Economics is not a Natural Science [Rushkoff]

[Acrylicist]

ECONOMICS IS NOT NATURAL SCIENCE

The marketplace in which most commerce takes place today is not a pre-
existing condition of the universe. It's not nature. It's a game, with
very particular rules, set in motion by real people with real
purposes. That's why it's so amazing to me that scientists, and people
calling themselves scientists, would propose to study the market as if
it were some natural system — like the weather, or a coral reef.

It's not. It's a product not of nature but of engineering. And to
treat the market as nature, as some product of purely evolutionary
forces, is to deny ourselves access to its ongoing redesign. It's as
if we woke up in a world where just one operating system was running
on all our computers and, worse, we didn't realize that any other
operating system ever did or could ever exist. We would simply accept
Windows as a given circumstance, and look for ways to adjust our
society to its needs rather than the other way around.

It is up to our most rigorous thinkers and writers not to base their
work on widely accepted but largely artificial constructs. It is their
job to differentiate between the map and the territory — to recognize
when a series of false assumptions is corrupting their observations
and conclusions. As the great interest in the arguments of Richard
Dawkins, Daniel Dennett, Sam Harris, and Christopher Hitchens shows
us, there is a growing acceptance and hunger for thinkers who dare to
challenge the widespread belief in creation mythologies. That it has
become easier to challenge the supremacy of God than to question the
supremacy of the market testifies to the way any group can fall victim
to a creation myth — especially when they are rewarded to do so.

Read the rest:

http://www.edge.org/3rd_culture/rushkoff09/rushkoff09_index.html