ABSTRACT
The quest for a positive science of economics has ended in failure. We have shown in Chapter 2 that the utilitarian philosophy of science was impossible to put into practice. The alternative positivist economic theory—the idea of a planned economy—was shown in Chapter 3 also to be inoperable. Furthermore, in Chapter 4 we have shown how the economic cannot be separated from the political and the social. The Veblenian critique was that individual wants are socially manipulated, and it is therefore futile to demonstrate how aggregate satisfaction can be maximised by markets: both are created by the vested interests. In Galbraith's phrase
it is the process of satisfying wants that creates the wants…the individual who urges the importance of production to satisfy these wants is precisely in the position of the onlooker who applauds the efforts of the squirrel to keep abreast of the wheel that is propelled by its own efforts.
(Galbraith 1958 p. 149) Moreover Mitchell and Commons showed how markets were themselves dependent on the social institutions of money and also of law and property rights. It is therefore not the case that the problems of economy are indeed universal for all societies, as was claimed by Robbins and others. The economic is itself defined by the society, and to claim that the ‘economic problem’ is universal is in fact reification.