I agree that economics has serious problems that can leave it looking like a shriveled science not worthy of the title “science”. There is a reason for this. Economics has been undermined for more than a hundred years.

When capitalism was born, classical economics had the goal of describing and understanding these new dynamics. It sought to answer questions such as how prices are determined or how labor dynamics affected profits, to name a few. It came up with answers through observation, statistical modeling, and what we would call today the scientific process.

It was later, in the late eighteenth century, that economics shriveled as a science and bloomed as an ideological and political tool. Many of the classical observations —such as how pricing is set by firms, how costs change through time, or how labor affects the production process— were scrapped. This new perspective didn’t see the market as turbulent, war-like, and aggressively cost-cutting. Rather, it portrayed the market as a perfectly lubricated machine that optimally distributes resources, maximizing personal utility as well as social utility.

This perfect machine was not science, but a political tool so that classical economists wouldn’t dare being critical of market economies. Even more so, this perfect machine was built so that politicians would not dare interrupt the motions of the machine.

If you’re interested in learning how this perfect machine was built and how classical economics sees the world, you can check out Anwar Shaikh.