Me:  Math is fine, thinking/theorizing is fine….especially if they are also accompanied by an awareness of the nature and signatures of paradigms and paradigm changes.

Here are the primary reasons why economists cannot seem to get beyond math and theorizing and do not/cannot see the new paradigm.

Macro-economics is only a recent discipline unconsciously designed to obscure and prevent solutions rather than solve them because:

1) The financialization of capitalism has been continual for its entire history and its coalescence was well under way before macro-economics came into being.

2) Private Banking/Finance enables the virtual monopolization of the means of survival for individuals and enterprise, and also enforces upon them its paradigm of Debt Only for the form and vehicle for the distribution of money.

3) As retail sale is the terminal end of the legitimate economic/actually productive process and Finance/money creation is increasingly post retail sale it is a parasite upon the rest of the legitimate economy.

4) Economists attempting to be dutiful scientists tend to ignore and/or reject concepts that even remotely reflect spirituality even though philosophically such concepts can be stripped of any supernatural or religious bias, and so they lack a clear and relevant philosophical concept of grace as in gifting/the free gift which, being in logical/conceptual opposition to the current paradigm of Debt/Burden Only, tends to obscure the new paradigm of Monetary Gifting.

5) Finally economic thought still adheres to a prejudice for employment even though technology has reduced the need for human effort and AI is more and more intrusively destroying both aggregate demand and the need for the input of human employment. There is nothing inherently wrong with employment as an economic factor of course and it still has a long way to go, though an ever decreasingly operant one, but positively acculturating leisure as in self chosen attentive purposeful activity is the healthy and intelligent route forward for economic systems and for humanity.

Paradigm perception and paradigm changes are deep and transformative events both mentally-conceptually and temporally, and thus require such fundamental openness and deep and incisive examination.

DT:  Good try, Craig, but where you say “unconsciously designed” you look to me like one of the “muddled students”.

Though I don’t agree with Craig’s (5) it is at (3) I seem him going wrong: still stuck in the same emprical paradigm as Frank, stil seeing exchange at moments in time as the be-all and end-all of economics. That surely is ‘micro’ rather than ‘macro’ economics.

Me:  I’m the one advocating the natural philosophical concept of grace….and also stuck in an empirical paradigm? No, I’m for the thorough integration of both empiricism and philosophy…and the thirdness greater oneness that such thorough integration of truths, workbilities, applicabilities and highest ethical considerations would create.

When one refers to the duality of TOTAL costs/prices in ratio to TOTAL actually available individual incomes they are talking about aggregates which is what macro-economics is about.

Economics is stuck in the figure-figure of gathering data and formalizing theory. It isn’t “into” perceiving paradigms old or new and hence by definition is shallow analysis. Even guys like Steve Keen whose brilliant de-bunking of DSGE and unconscious re-affirmation of Douglas’s monetary insight talks about paradigm change….but he doesn’t study historical paradigm changes to derive their signatures so as to recognize what a new one would be characterized by. Let’s talk about and study paradigms and paradigm changes here. It would be extremely enlightening.

A paradigm change is the ultimate radical human change, mentally and temporally. As our mental state and the temporal universe are opposites it is by definition an ultimate integrative event. Such a radical change is by definition temporally deep and mentally extraordinary. How much more radical a monetary change can you get than one from scarcity to abundance and from the monopolistic power of private finance to identification as an illegitimate economic business model?

To think paradigmatic-ally you have to dare to think in terms of opposites and inversions. Otherwise you’re only doing the legitimate but less integrative actions of gathering data or theorizing.

PP:  Any discussion where money is a stock is accounting, not economics. So saying we have or don’t have enough money is household accounting, or it’s business. Economics is about the flow of value and money in society as a whole. So if the flow works right people generate and exchange value, and as if by magic we have money to pay for it. If there’s no money, because it’s tied up or stuck in someone’s pocket, that’s a flow problem not an amount problem.

Me:  “Any discussion where money is a stock is accounting, not economics.”

The ratio of total costs/prices to total individual incomes as a moment to moment flow is a basic and insightful integration of accounting and economics.

“Economics is about the flow of value and money in society as a whole.”

Actually its most basically about the flow of costs/prices and money in society in totality/as a whole.

“If there’s no money, because it’s tied up or stuck in someone’s pocket, that’s a flow problem not an amount problem.”

As the above costs/prices to individual income ratio is true as a continuing and inherent flow enlightened by doing the calculus/mathematics of flow on the cost accounting data the resulting scarcity ratio is both an amount and a flow problem.

When in doubt integrate…and keep on integrating.