Grace as in patience and understanding is always the most imortant lesson to learn in life. However, there is a rational end to patience and the non-reflective occasionally need to be jolted back into present time regarding that fact.

Steve Hummel 01/07/2019

E:  In this blog many times we are advised to reread Karl Polanyi’s classic, The Great Transformation. Good advice, which I am heeding.  My view is that underlying both the euro and neoliberalism (and associated things such as austerity) is the power of unfettered multinational corporate capital. I try to include this view in everything I say to anyone about economics.

Me: Yes, but what is the power behind the corporations, and what is the current paradigm of that power? Finally, what is the new paradigm that will replace the primacy of the old one and resolve its problems?

E:  Good questions Craig. No simple answers to post here. My point is to encourage all discussions of politics and economics to stop ignoring the elephant in the room, the dominant institution of our time. The power of modern corporate capital (an expression I prefer to the ideological “capitalism”) is 419 years old this year. The concept of corporate “personhood” is at least 150 years old. These are long times for the development of complexities, so none of it is simple.

Its current expression of increasing dominance is rentier, or unearned, capital (as contrasted with capital that actually accomplishes something, the core of the “real” economy).

The current fascination with “sustainability” offers some focus for investigating corporate power. Hyman Minsky’s work shows how it is unstable, different from Marx’s focus. If it is unstable, likely it is unsustainable, and so will an economy where that power is dominant. Perhaps not crashing for good in my lifetime, but still … .

Me:  I can certainly get behind curbing the power of multi-national corporations global reach (or even domestic ones who choose domination over cooperation). If corporations want to be legally considered individuals then they should be subject to the same legal sanctions as individuals and also be able to benefit from the policies I suggest….so long as they do not commit accounting fraud or any other economic vice. Humanizing the economy, like life, grants both freedoms and demands ethics.

As the beneficial abundance and equally beneficial deflationary cost cutting effects of the discount/rebate policy and Wisdomics-Gracenomics are instituted we would probably be wise to counter both any arbitrary and greedy price increases by enterprise before retail sale and any attempts to destroy competitors by near monopoly businesses with large price cutting. Both could be taxed for such after scrutinizing their books which would be a regulatory part of implementing the new paradigm policies of the universal dividend and the discount/rebate.

Recognizing the monetary and economic significance of a high percentage discount/rebate policy at the point of retail sale is absolutely the awakening experience of the new paradgm. With it you do not have to worry about inflation and you can directly and reciprocally inject virtually as much money into the economy as you desire thus transforming the current systemic realities of individual income scarcity, by definition business revenue scarcity and the balkiness and tendency toward recession and instability as well. It is THE insight. It’s the observation of the moons of Jupiter and the discovery of the ellipse of economics.

In fact C. H. Douglas was the Copernicus of economics as he first posited its monetary disequilibrium. I am his Kepler and Galileo.

Breaking up the paradigm on grace monopolized by the Church during The Reformation is inversely reflective of breaking up both private finance’s monopoly money creating power and its current paradigm of Debt Only with the new paradigm of grace as in monetary gifting.

Conceptual opposition, reflectivity, inversion and the integration of the truths in opposites are major signatures of paradigm change. Look and understand.

….it occurs, it is implemented at an ending, summing and terminal expression point of the entire economic and legitimate productive process. Hence it is also the ending, summing and terminal expression point for the current economy’s old paradigm and its most chronic problematic realities of individual income scarcity, systemic monetary austerity, lack of flow and chronic inflation. This point IS therefore also a tipping, turning, pivoting and fulcrum point from which enough policy effect can completely invert these problematic realities.

Signatures of paradigm changes: inversion, transformation, all but the most antithetical structures in the body of knowledge, human system or area of human endeavor in which the new paradigm applies remain virtually the same and yet the character of the body of knowledge etc. is completely changed. The actual operation that brought about the paradigm change has always been simple but its effect has always been profound.

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R:  Economics is not a science because it assumes anything that is called money to be an accurate measure (quantifier) of value. It is as if the hard sciences (chemistry, physics etc.) picked up any random stone at hand wrote kg on it and declared it a Kg or any random stick off of the ground and called it a meter, measured with it once, threw it down, and picked up another without any calibration to perform the next measurement Money currently exists as a unit not a standard any scientist can easily explain this.
Without trace-ability to a common standard there is no science. Science and demonstration repeat-ability require a bonafide standard calibrated to a definition. Not some misunderstood relic managed by elites for predatory purposes dragging along problems of distribution, dead-weight loss due to included debt,randomly imposed taxes and quasi-calibration manipulation.
Current money not only doesn’t work for efficient markets, it also does not work for scientific analysis. Economists need to admit their sunk costs and get back to the basis of their discipline. The problem is not getting gullible students to trust economics as science but to actually do science.
Everything starts with an accurate exchange of value between one buyer and one seller with a standardized money as the quantifier of the transaction. You know your model works when it can be repeated millions of times consistently in the real world.
That is science.

Me: riddulin,

I really, really like everything you say in that post. The only problem is that it doesn’t recognize the shortcomings of science and the consequent necessity for wisdom/paradigm perception/the integrative ethic in order to habituate awareness of essence in pursuit of knowledge and the deeper truth.

And that recognition/tipping point in economics and money systems is where we all are presently at. We have to look for the way to change scarcity and austerity to abundance, balkiness to free flow and domination to graciousness….and the point of final exchange as you correctly point out is the place to contemplate because “you’ll know your model works when” its policy effect at a tipping/pivoting/summing/ending point “can be repeated millions of times consistently in the world” and it transforms scarcity and austerity into abundance, balkiness into free flow and domination into graciousness.

The actual operation that brought about every paradigm change has always been simple, as in an inversion of current realities, but its effects are always profound. (inversion of the position of the earth and the sun, from nomadic existence to homesteading-agriculture, from monopoly control over salvation to a direct and individual relationship with god, from handwriting to technology and machine production….or elite public or private monopoly control of money to an ethic of direct democratic distribution of same and from Debt/Burden/Additional Cost Only to Monetary Gifting within a digital debt based money system.

RL:  +reestablish” is a presumption. I never found economics of much value, so nothing to reestablish. It is a propaganda ploy.

VM: Hear hear!

As to Dave’s comment, I believe that, under radical uncertainty, there is no truth whatsoever. And economics is not to establish or approach the truth – it is just a poor prelude to making human decisions. Or even not that.

Thank God, I am not an economist. I am an engineer-economist, a toolmaker. Somebody has not to talk about paradigms and assumptions and values but to make (pneumatic?) hammers, hoping that the age and arthritis of the decision-makers would make them sufficiently cautious.

DT: Bob, “Here here!” from me too, though the propaganda ploy was to re-label Aristotle’s “chrematism” (money making) as “economics”, and Shannon’s “noise” as “radical uncertainty”.

Vladimir, thank you for triggering an interesting line of thought. I too am an “engineer-economist”, a tool-maker, but in the English sense of the word ‘engineer’: neither a Russian materialist maker of hammers nor an American driver of steam engines but “an interpreter between the philosopher and the working mechanic who needs to understand the language of both”. A comparison of American and English steam engines suggests enlarging the c.1800 definition I quoted to include art as well as functionality and reliability, and I wonder: have you not heard a writer described as a “wordsmith”?

As a child I aspired to be a writer, while more conscious of art in illustrations, poetry and music. As a youth I was taught to use not only a hammer but a soldering iron and frequency analysis, though personally my real interest was in engines, electronic circuits and mathematical patterns. In my twenties I was gifted a correspondence course in writing which I still have, though it wanted me to write what readers wanted to hear, not what needed to be said. To cut a long story short, I became a writer concerned with the experimental development of functionality, reliability and elegance in the use of computer languages, but still found managers interested only in “today’s” functionality.

In “hammer” terms, it was as if, having advanced from making horse shoes to wrought iron gates, most people saw only the gates, not works of art and reliability achieved by simplicity and ease of maintenance.

The engineering is in the design, but the product is only as good as the materials it is made of: i.e. the prior engineering of the iron works or programming language. As an “engineer-economist”, therefore, I have always tried to understand what I was doing before trying to to do it, but had to live with people pooh-poohing all I have aspired to and to a large extent achieved: an elegant, meaningful, reliable and human form of economy using honest money. “Working mechanics” may like to be told what they have to do, Vladimir, but blueprints involving new processes may be of little use without retraining.

Me:  Vladimir and Dave,

I have always enjoyed the art of your posts.

“Thank God, I am not an economist. I am an engineer-economist, a toolmaker. Somebody has not to talk about paradigms and assumptions and values but to make (pneumatic?) hammers, hoping that the age and arthritis of the decision-makers would make them sufficiently cautious.”

Yes, except I would place the word ONLY after the word values. Therefore it becomes and integration of opposites.

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“Working mechanics” may like to be told what they have to do, Vladimir, but blueprints involving new processes may be of little use without retraining.”

Yes, that describes the problem of new paradigm perception very well.

A paradigm change is not the end of discovery, but it is the beginning of an extremely progressive and permanent gain in human knowledge. There is no end to history only an ascension and deepening of our understanding of it via wisdom-paradigm change.

The key to wisdom-paradigm perception is developing an integrative mindset toward opposite concepts coupled with an inclusive scientific method. Iconoclasm is a good first step toward paradigm perception, but is ultimately inadequate because it keeps the mind focused on and only within the old paradigm.

It IS a monetary economy and a monetary economics can re-establish its scientific chops if it understands that the goal of FREE FLOW is best accomplished by finding the fulcrum point where the flow of costs, prices and the expression of its deepest and most chronic problems are terminally statistically expressed and STOPS for all consumer items and services, and then applying a simple accounting and mathematical operation of equal subtraction/discount and addition/rebate as a policy at that point that benefits all agents individual and commercial.

These integrations of opposites-wisdom operations (flowing and stopping) (rate of flow-calculus and final statics) (individual and commercial) are the keys to the paradigm change everyone here is desiring.

And of course the world not being an entirely rational or ethical place additional regulations will be necessary to guide and protect the resulting progressiveness of the paradigm change.

FS:  Money is a convenient but simple indicator, which is why it is used. The classical labour theory of the value of production is valid empirically and underlies why macroeconomic analysis is partially successful when based on money which is acting as a proxy for labour-based value.

R:  Money as a measuring tool is also very easy to corrupt. It is important to remember that money can only be used to determined an exchange value(price) of a specific item at a specific instant of time. If employed with the intention of good faith by all parties it is very accurate.
The other definitions of value (labor, use etc.) are not accurately measurable and can only be priced by extrapolation to a similar exchange value. While helpful in understanding and visualizing the factors that affect value they are no good in assigning a price to an item. Money is still necessary, Good money if you want to do business and bad money if the goal is to steal.

Me:  ridullin,

“The other definitions of value (labor, use etc.) are not accurately measurable and can only be priced by extrapolation to a similar exchange value. While helpful in understanding and visualizing the factors that affect value they are no good in assigning a price to an item. Money is still necessary, Good money if you want to do business and bad money if the goal is to steal.”

Correct. And retail sale being the aggregation of all costs for every item or service is THE macro-economic metric and significance that emerges….IF one actually looks at it. Otherwise they fall back into never ending and obscuring complexity.

Retail sale, its macro-economic significance and an integrative mindset I refer to as paradigm perception enable one to see possible policy potentialities clearly and logically.

Of course there is no end to history and the world is not an entirely rational or ethical place so some sovereign regulations and sanctions, as with any system and even for paradigm changes, will also be necessary, but cogniting on the economic and policy ramifications of the point of retail sale is the invention of the telescope, the discovery of the moons of Jupiter and of the ellipse of economics.

R:  Craig,
Would you provide link that describes your theory. I can’t understand why all prices don;t have to be accurate. I have seen it in the past but have misplaced it.
Thanks in advance.

Me: My blog is wisdomicsblog.com

It is mostly a chronicle of my postings and their evolution over the last couple years. Most of my theory of the new paradigm Wisdomics-Gracenomics can be deciphered within that non-linear course with some concentration. I am close to boiling it down into a non-tome e book that I will self publish and promote. That will include some of the insights I have garnered from my study of the signatures of paradigm changes themselves like for instance this one which is guaranteed to drive the unfortunately scientisitc nuts: Everything adapts to a new paradigm….not the other way around. That doesn’t mean that further insight within a new paradigm is not possible it simply means that a paradigm change is by definition a huge, significant and obviously progressive event…and that humanity (so far) has never regressed back and away from.

There is no better illustration of the hypnotic and blinding effects of an old/current paradigm than the fact that the best heterodox economists on the planet suggest policies and make observations that reflect and align with the new paradigm of Monetary Grace as in Gifting….and yet they cannot see that new paradigm concept or complete the crafting of policy to unequivocably make it the temporal universe reality.

THEY. LOOK. RIGHT. STRAIGHT. AT. IT., YET. DON’T. PERCEIVE. IT.

I think I’m going to write and illustrate The Little Picture Book of Paradigm Changes to show both how simple the essence and actions of all paradigms have been and how blinded those who didn’t see it when it was right there in front of them have always looked to paradigm perceivers.

Create humerous cartoon situations and scenarios about how simple the inversion aspect of paradigm change for H & G to Ag, Gutenberg Press, Reformation, Copernican Cosmological and Monetary Gifting actually are.

(show economists blinfolded saying UBI, modern debt jubilee, job guarantee, government deficits, financial parasitism, public banks and yet missing bright neon lights spelling out Monetary Gifting and the high percentage discount/rebate policy)

(show doctrinaire libertarian saying he won’t accept his dividend, wife hitting him over the head with a rolling pin, him dizzily saying “maybe it might not be a bad idea” with lump on head)

(Also show CEO getting kicked out becuse he objected to discount/rebate and dividend policies) (Also politician getting literally kicked in the ass by students, women, workers and businessmen after opposing the D/R & D)

(Also bankers and any businesses who cheat on the system getting taxed and thrown out of business by the people/government)

(fat assed bankers isolated trying to keep their monopoly control of money as debt with multitudes revolting against them)

(religionist saying gifting is bad with grace is a gift from God picture behind him)

(politicians spouting gifting will make you lazy in senate/House and then with their feet up on their desks accepting big bucks from the bankers)

(bankers planning war in order to stop the new paradigm)

Me:  The temporal universe flows freely and the economy is inextricably embedded within the temporal universe. If it does not flow freely, then it has elements that prevent it from being so. We have a monetary economy and money is the most salient and significant factor in it. The temporal universe being in such free flowing state/process it abhors a statistical equilibrium. All heterodox economists recognize that there is a scarcity of individual aggregate demand and they recommend and offer policies they think will remedy that scarcity. The problem is these policies are either one off (“a modern debt jubilee”) and/or think only filling the statistical gap between total costs and so prices and total individual aggregate demand is adequate policy. These balancing policy ideas, even if it is with additional monetary input, still have the stench of DSGE hanging around it.

The free flowingness solution of course is CONTINUOUSLY filling the monetary gap to ABUNDANT overflowing with a high percentage discount/rebate policy tied to the terminal expression point of inflation and the terminal ending point of the entire economy, i.e. retail sale.

FS: May I add, science is a joint accumulative effort where the body of knowledge and understanding is continually reassessed against the empirical evidence. This is the essence of the scientific method.

Economics is almost the obverse. The only testing against the empirical evidence is to judge how well the curve fitting has been carried out. Hypotheses are never rejected when they fail to match the empirical evidence. This rejection of the scientific method appears to be taught as the appropriate mode of economic thinking. Why!!??

KZ:  Frank, I agree that economists seem to have little interest in anything other than their own conjecturing when it comes to their “science.” This is not unique in science, however. Even physicists do it regularly.

Part of the problem is that the “reassessment” process you mention is difficult to make work in practice. In fact, the reassessment isn’t so much that as a construction of a new scientific understanding. In the words of physicist Andrew Pickering’s book, “Constructing Quarks,” “I try to avoid the circular idiom of naive realism whereby the product of a historical process, in this case the perceived reality of quarks, is held to determine the process itself. The view taken here is that the reality of quarks was the upshot of particle physicists’ practice, and not the reverse: hence the title of the book, Constructing Quarks.” … “the emphasis is on practice.”

FS:  Ken, I would suggest a different stress to that which I think you are doing. There will be individual scientists who will act in error for a variety of reasons including deliberate misrepresentation, but it is the body of the scientific community who will establish that which can not be invalidated. I was hoping that would be how economists would examine my paper, “Transient Development”. The analysis is fully consistent with the empirical evidence, but detractors claim it can not be true but a variety of spurious reasons.

KZ:  Frank, you are correct. Scientists establish what all can and should accept as fact via consensus. But it’s consensus about practice, not each fact or experiment. You should also note that when Pickering and others who study science use the term construction, they are attempting to bring our attention to how both science and science facts are created – they are constructed. In the case of Quarks, for example, high-energy physicists constructed them over a 50-year period. Pickering’s book is an attempt to describe the history of the construction process. It’s a fascinating story. And, being a story about humans, it includes errors, some massive, falsehoods, and delusions.

Me:  What is being discussed here is the need for a new economic philosophy AND even more importantly….a new scientific philosophy. I have posted the following ascending scale of scientific actions here several times: research/data gathering, theorizing, philosophy. paradigm perception/change/the deeper, fuller more complete understanding AKA wisdom.

I have heard Steve Keen, who I consider probably the most astute economist on the planet, say we need a new economic philosophy….and then go right back to posting mathematics until in his own words MEGO (my eyes glaze over) occurs. And there of course isn’t anything wrong with research/data gathering and theorizing….it’s just that it’s important to know when to go to a more integrative level of understanding.

We need to go from the invalidated DSGE to “a philosophy of the higher disequilibrium” and then paradigm change. And we need to go from the intellectually delicious and necessary mode of inquiry of Science ONLY to the science inclusive and more mentally integrative level of wisdom.

KZ:  Craig, interesting. But let me ask you about your ascending scale of scientific actions. Have you observed “scientists” taking these actions? And if so, how and why did they create them and how do they use them. In other words, is this their ascending scale of actions or yours? That answer can be determined only by observing, for example biologists or sociologists. And, secondly if this is the observable process, what are the results? What do scientists construct by using it?

Me: Actually I left out a prior action in that ascending scale, hypothesis, which is the beginning of the scientific method/process. It’s obvious that research/data gathering is science’s next step which is combinatory/integrative, then theorizing which is organizing data and observations in coherent ways like capitalism or socialism in pursuit of a further mental and logical integration of ideas, i.e. a philosophy like free markets, monetarily re-distributive and structurally manipulated markets or Direct Distributism.

The hard sciences often get to the philosophical level. Economics rarely has and as we see is now in the state of iconoclasm/de-construction. Paradigm changes of course are extremely rare and are the next to highest level of integration of only the truths in opposites. In fact a paradigm itself is an integrative construct of the opposites of a single concept that fits almost seamlessly within the generalized structures of the old paradigm and yet creates an entirely new pattern whose character is transformed. So this IS observably the scientific process.

Science is (generally) a trinity-truth fragmenting-process (hypothesis, the dualistic process of assessing truthfulness or falsity of data and theories). Wisdom is a trinity-unity-oneness-wholeness-process (the integration of a bothness/duality to the point of a thirdness greater oneness) which utilizes and includes the scientific method but again is ultimately an integrative process.

So the observable process of science is a fragmentary determination of truths that mostly stops at the theorizing level due to the increasingly integrative necessity to move up the scale to philosophy combined with its (science’s) habituation to doubt. Wisdom being an entirely integrative process can continue to ascend the scale unless it degenerates into orthodoxy/dogma at which time it falls back into dualism. If it becomes aware of and relates to the pinnacle concept of wisdom, grace, it can ascend to the level of paradigm and even to the beatific level of ethic/zeitgeist.

Scientists, philosophers and paradigm perceivers/seekers of wisdom all construct realities. It’s just that the latter two generally construct and create higher integrations thereof.

KZ:  Craig, nothing about science is obvious till people do it. I don’t know what you mean that hard science often gets to the philosophical level. I know many “hard” scientists. Most despise philosophy and philosophers even more so. You should consider the history of the term “hard science.” It was invented by physicists as an insult to the so called “soft” sciences, including biology, geology, and all the “social or behavioral” sciences.

Me:  What you describe is rigidly orthodox, exclusionary and IMO stupid science.

“I know many “hard” scientists. Most despise philosophy and philosophers even more so.”

To their detriment and to the further acculturation of orthodoxy and it’s inevitable personal result if unchecked by wisdom…arrogance. The reason they despise philosophy is because they’re probably only focusing on the ORTHODOX variety which becomes the withdrawing trap of sophistry….not wisdom which is the integration of opposites like the integration of the mental and temporal which is consciousness itself.

“For these scientists, science is an elite calling that only the “smartest people in the room” can perform. Many physicists are self-absorbed and arrogant, with the level of each declining as we move from physical scientists to social scientists, with geologists often the least self-absorbed and arrogant.”

Precisely as I have just described ORTHODOX science.

As I pointed out in my prior post science and wisdom are complementary modes of inquiry, and yet science is but a subset within wisdom

Anyone who has been educated is habituated to orthodoxy, while true education, which is wisdom, is the first step toward innovation, new insight and ultimately paradigm change.

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JS:  We might benefit from asking ‘cui bono?’ – who benefits from the way economics is taught – since it seems not to serve those looking for a social physics.

JV:  I’m afraid not, JC. The dichotomy you’re seeking doesn’t exists. There are no textbooks to be found that take the economy as a dynamic system to be their point of departure. All economics teachers are alike where it concerns their paycheck. Seeking a “social physics” umbrella doesn’t help either in a system where all its activities are noted in a unit of account. The physical outcomes of those activities remaining unaffected even during the worst imaginable crash; which only is a crash of accounts. Hence it is solely the underlying accounting of the system hat should be the focus of teaching economics. And such a modus operandi is dynamic at its very core.

Me:  John Vertegaal, Precisely. And that’s why Steve Keen’s charts illustrating the accounting equation that assets and liabilities sum to zero is minimally enlightening while a study of its subset of cost accounting datums and the use of calculus on them enlightens the fact that the economic system is in an inherent state of profound scarcity disequilibrium regarding total individual incomes and total costs and so prices.

PB:  Speaking as an engineer by training, what economics needs is a Handbook of Applied Economics equivalent to Perry’s Handbook of Chemical Engineering.
Great handbooks draw editors for each chapter from real life practitioners, often retired, who have actually built things; bridges, chemical processes, nuclear power plants, etc.
An economics handbook would draw chapter editors from chartered banking, investment banking, central banking, credit card issuers, payment processors, as well as insurers, pension fund managers, hedge fund managers, portfolio mutual funds, money markets. There would be sections on government policy, fiscal deficits, monetary authorities, and crisis management, but also banking best practices, empirical data, and rules of thumb for prudent lending ratios, risk management, and reducing fraud.
Such a handbook edited by retired professionals free from the perverse incentives of our status quo economic forums should be embraced as an authoritative counterbalance to academic journals and policy wonks. Just the brazenness of a handbook tittle that combines banking, finance, and asset management along with government fiscal and monetary policy along with risk management writ large would be a revelation.

JC:  @ peterblogda – but that is the whole point, economics is neither chemistry nor physics. It is about the human soul and its strengths and weaknesses. To try to make a science of this is to make an ass of science, to misunderstand its strengths and weaknesses. If we had an economics of and for the lived world, it is clear that the science aspects of economic activity could support and maybe clarify it. Just as chemistry may support and clarify a brilliant chef’s work – which is to produce joy rather than mere nutrition.

Me:  @JC Spender,

Actually you’re quite right except that’s wisdom. Wisdomics-Gracenomics is wisdom applied to the economy via the relevant aspects of its (wisdom’s) pinnacle concept of grace as in love in action/policy in the temporal universe. Wisdom is not just niceness or some airy-fairy nonsense. Its the thorough integration of the practical and the ethical/ideal.

Peterblogdonovich’s Handbook suggestion is a good one and if its final chapter were an exegesis of the aspects of the natural philosophical and pinnacle concept of wisdom, i.e. grace, it would be found that all of the observations and policy recommendations of the leading heterodox economists (like financial parasitism, UBI-Universal Dividend-QE for the Individual) align perfectly with that concept. The one synergistic policy they all have missed is the high percentage discount/rebate policy which is the very expression of the new monetary, economic and financial paradigm of Abundant Direct and Reciprocal Monetary Gifting.

HS:  With best wishes for a peaceful and nuclear-free 2019 to all, I would say that we would be better off sticking with any Orthodox positions that are of some relevance to anything at all, let alone a science that is so subjective that it will take a lifetime of prayer to lead it to salvation.
Poor students!

Me:  Yes Helen, that is precisely what the endless debates about the particles of truth and untruth in orthodox and heterodox economic theories leads to. However, new paradigms historically leave all but the most antithetical to the new paradigm structures and theoretics virtually unchanged while, almost magically, transforming for the better the body of knowledge/area of human endeavor that the new paradigm applies to. It’s a testament to the power of a single concept, which is the essence of a new paradigm, to change an entire pattern while simultaneously leaving most of its temporal structures untouched.

FS:  The desire to simplify leads to unwarranted conclusions. Economics is not an exclusive-or as to whether it is a science or is not. Economics has two aspects, selection of alternatives and the results of the selections. The selection of alternatives is at times unpredictable and at other times it is predictable. The results of known selections are predictable. Analysis needs to deal with appropriately.

Me:  It can, or in the case of a paradigm change it’s a simple, singular concept that applied resolves numerous chronic problems within the old paradigm. In which case it is an integration of the simple and the complex. Conceptual opposition is the major signature of the need for paradigm change, and the integration of opposites to the point of thirdness greater oneness is the mark of paradigm change accomplished.

KZ:  Peterblogdanovich’s suggestions are useful, in my view. Most every discipline with which I do work publishes handbooks. Anthropology, sociology, psychology, geography in the social sciences. All the physical sciences. Even history has handbooks; dozens of them. Handbooks are normally best thought of as books of case studies, encounter descriptions, project descriptions, work assignments, or training exercises. Such handbooks extend to most of the major sub-disciplines, as well. For example, economic Anthropology, social psychology, social stratification, molecular engineering, modular nuclear reactors, subatomic physics, organic chemistry, tectonics, etc. They’re great reference documents and excellent teaching tools, in most instances. There are several handbooks of macroeconomics available. Investigating whether any would help with the problems Romer identifies in macroeconomics would be worthwhile, in my view.

Me:  Integrating the opposites of technics and philosophy is the solution. After all, metaphorically speaking, you’ll never get to the goal of heaven until you awaken to the efficacy of grace.