Is Economics A Science? No. But it Can Be – By Converting from Via Positiva to Via Negativa.

I could give a similar lecture that would reduce economics to a science, and my claims would be obvious, and obviously true, and they would terrify the audience.

In large part, economics is a pseudoscience that tries to circumvent the laws of the universe just as do philosophy and religion, when the underlying science is rather simple: The demographic composition and distribution of a people, the institutional sequence and time necessary to produce rule of law of natural law, by the incremental suppression of irreciprocity, resulting in the highest trust, least friction in an economy at whatever of level of effort (work hours) the population prefers in exchange for its standard of living (consumption).

What’s the problem? markets perform natural selection if they can suppress reproduction of the unfit for markets, and democratic politics suppress natural selection until the population’s abilty to maintain pace with competitors eliminates the possibility of redistributions by investments in commons.

In other words, the only long-term variable that maintains competitive advantage is human capital and the single most important human capital is the combination of intelligence and conscientiousness both of which are the result of neotenic evolution by natural selection for cooperation in increasingly complex markets.

Or in simple form: economic science is and always will be limited to the measurement of the success of institutions in producing human capital by adherence to the logical, physical, behavioral, and evolutionary laws of the universe by the implementation of rule of law, markets, and meritocratic reproduction.

Now try to sell that inescapable scientific law of the universe under democracy, the entire function of which appears to be to use fiat credit to evade the laws of the universe, and return us to Malthusian limits. That’s the science. So like I said, what we call positive economics is an attempt to cheat mother nature and it’s just never going to happen.

The only economic science is like the law, negative: eliminating what we should NOT do.