All the extant economic models are artifacts of bygone eras. The economic models of the 19th century–all based on the implicit assumption that resources were endless–were modified in the 1930s into Keynesian hallucinations still based on endless resources: let’s just pay people with freshly printed “money” to dig holes and fill them. This presumes endless resources to squander on digging holes and filling them, as if that is a productive use of labor and resources.
This hallucination continues to be the dominant paradigm: resources are endless because we’re clever and there will always be a substitute for whatever is depleted, so the “solution” is just print “money” to pay people to dig holes and fill them.
The “problem” is “growth” of consumption, and so if we “solve” that problem by goosing consumption by any means available, we enter “Mouse Utopia,” an artificial world of never-ending abundance.
The book Money, Blood and Revolution: How Darwin and the Doctor of King Charles I Could Turn Economics into a Science takes a stab at turning economics into “science,” but that’s not actually “the problem.” The real problem is all models have intrinsic limits and end up hallucinating, but those controlling the gearing of the model depend on it to maintain their own power, so they are blind to the failure of their precious model to track the real world and generate authentic understanding.
So we’re told that all is well because GDP and the stock market are rising, and since we have lots of natural gas to power AI data centers, we’re entering a “Mouse Utopia” of endless abundance. That these are all hallucinations is lost on those clinging to collapsing models as the means of maintaining their power.