--- Shane Taylor <shane.taylor at verizon.net> wrote:
>
> Despite Duesenberry's apparent success, many
> economists felt uncomfortable with his
> relative-income
> hypothesis, which to them seemed more like sociology
> or psychology than economics. The profession was
> therefore immediately receptive to alternative
> theories that sidestepped those disciplines.
[WS:] The main - and I may add, the only - function of economic theory in a capitalist society is legitmation of the capitalist system as a "natural" institituion ruled by "natural" laws akin to the laws of physics. This physics-envy is not just a wet dream of the economic profession - it is the only product the economists have in store that is of any value to the ruling class. Without that physics-envy, economics would utterly fail its main function - to legitmize capitalism as a "natural" institution, but instead would portray it is a subjective one, and as such, subject to questioning.
Consequently, predictive validity of economics is irrelevant. Being factually wrong is a small price to pay for maintaining that the dominat instituional order is anything but "natural." This is akin to mediveal cosmology maintaining that the Earth was the center of the universe. That claim was the ideological foundation of the institutional structure of power on Earth, and empircal facts that contradicted it were irrelevant.
This is why any theoretical acknowledgement of these inconvenient facts was fiercely opposed by the guardains of the geo-centric orthodoxy, and their proponents were persecuted and killed. Today, economists do not have the power of burning the heretics at stake, of course, but they do have the power to thoroughly purge them from academic institutions and journals as well as from government agencies dealing with economic issues.
Wojtek
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