I’ve was just yesterday struck with a new insight that dovetails very nicely with the underlying principle underlying the post. What inspired the insight was reading E.F. Shaumacher’s less well-known work, The Guide to the Perplexed, where on the topic of the over-reliance that modern society has on science to provide us with an understanding of the world. He brought attention to a quote by a psychiatrist by the name of Victor E. Frankel, who wrote,” The present danger does not really lie on the loss of universality on the part of the scientist, but rather in his pretence and claim of totality…What we have to deplore is not so much the fact that scientists are specialising, but rather the fact that specialists are generalising.”

How that relates to the topic at hand, is that just like the scientists in the quote above, economists are merely the students of one particular body of knoweledge. That knowledge is a merely a fragment and inevitably incomplete. Yet like the scientists, in their hubris and conceit and the economists believe that their incomplete body of knowledge can be utilised to apply their model across the breadth of human endeavour without consideration or reference to other ways of understanding the totality of collective human action. The danger lies in the fact that they have managed to convince not only government and business leaders that their model is completely objective and free from value judgements and thus can be applied to all nations and societies without signicant adaptions or modifications, when neither claim is true.