ABSTRACT
Economics has increasingly become an intellectual game played for its own sake and not for its practical consequences for understanding the economic world. Economists have converted the subject into a sort of social mathematics in which analytical rigour is everything and practical relevance is nothing. Blaug formulates matters at least as starkly: Modern economics is sick. In France, in particular, the cultural impact of mathematics has, since the Enlightenment at least, been very powerful. Yet even in France it is only since the early twentieth century that the attempts to mathematise economics have risen to dominance. The author proposing a socio-evolutionary explanation of the development and persistence of modern mainstream economics interpreted as the project concerned to formalise social/economic phenomena. There are also numerous historical examples whereby the feed-forward version of the PVRS model is appropriate, of variety-generating factors influencing, or at least being brought to bear in an attempt to influence, the selecting environment as well.
