Me: “Proving things ‘rigorously’ in mathematical models is at most a starting point for doing an interesting and relevant economic analysis. Forgetting to supply export warrants to the real world makes the analysis an empty exercise in formalism without real scientific value.”

Precisely. It’s mere abstraction and sophistry. It’s arguing over how many angels can dance on the head of a pin. What is required is a paradigm change which inverts and transforms realities in the body of knowledge under discussion. Such changes are the result of a new insight, and the new insight needed now is that if you take firm and rational control of the terminal expression point of all forms of inflation by implementing a relatively high percentage discount/rebate policy at retail sale you can inject virtually as much money into the economy as you please and not only eliminate inflation but beneficially integrate price deflation into profit making economic systems. Oh sure, you’ll need to do some further regulation humans not being entirely rational or ethical, but “It’s better to be roughly right than precisely wrong”, no?

P:  You make a good point. For example, current macro theory distinguishes between expenditures that are investments versus consumption. So individual incomes are thought to be saved for investment or consumed. Ignoring for now that a lot of investment comes from banks and not from savers, more fundamentally, look at we consider to be consumption rather than investment.
Having a child, feeding a child, educating a child, clothing a child, in brief, raising a child, is not considered an investment by economists. Think about that.

Me: Correct. Abstraction too often results in objectification….of everything including the experience of oneself and everybody else.

This of course is why Wisdom, whose source of information IS direct existential experience OF oneself/one’s consciousness (no matter whether you believe it to be supernatural or integrally natural) ….is so important.

Systems were made for man, not man for systems. Economists need to make that truth their most fundamental ethic and policy effect….and we’ll undoubtedly find our way…because consciousness, again no matter how one wants to define it, is such a fundamental and powerful fact and experience.