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Once this has been clarified, other mistakes are easily avoided. Soros follows a long series of social theorists in identifying ‘physics’ envy’ as a fundamental obstacle for the progress of social science. But physicists and biologists make extensive use of equilibrium models, and equilibrium is a reflexive notion. So physics’ envy cannot be the problem. That neoclassical economic theory borrowed some analytical tools from Newtonian physics is a historiographic platitude.5 Overall this may have been a bad or a good idea, but it has certainly not prevented economists from understanding reflexivity (if anything, the opposite is true). Newtonian physics did not dictate economists the theory of rational expectations or the EMH. Financial economists ‘ended up’ with such hypotheses for a number of contingent reasons, but their ignorance of reflexivity was not one of them. In fact the central modelling tools of rational choice theory, such as equilibria and belief revision, capture the essential features of reflexivity remarkably well. If reflexivity is a fundamental feature of social phenomena, as Soros contends, then the economic theory of choice is well equipped to explain social reality.