Doctors of Doctrine

In the wake of the great crash of 2008 a lot of young people suddenly became interested in finance and signed up for university courses to learn about the detail of what went wrong. Instead, what they got was a load of nonsense dressed up as learning that bore little relation to the real world. Well, what did they expect, they chose to study economics?

Our of this was born the Rethinking Economics movement, an attempt to introduce new ideas and concepts into economic education, to adopt a pluralist approach. The problem with this, well meaning though it is, is that reforming economics is akin to Martin Luther nailing his theses to the door of All Saints’ Church in Wittenberg: all it does is create a schism in a religious cult. Economics doesn’t need re-thinking, it needs to be put out of its misery.

Pardon My Indulgences

On the 31st October, 1517 it’s reported that the theologian Martin Luther kicked off the Protestant Reformation by nailing his 95 Theses to the door of the church in Wittenberg. Luther’s beef was over the sale of indulgences by priests; allowing people to reduce their sins in the eyes of God by payment to the Catholic Church. This apparently small act of rebellion was to cause a schism in the Christian church and, fueled by openly available information from Gutenberg’s printing presses, was to lead to hundreds of years of brutal atrocities and religious wars. Arguably those conflicts are still ongoing.

With the benefit of hindsight we could argue that the true revolution wasn’t happening in Wittenberg but nearly 500 miles east in the Polish town of Fromberk where another priest, Nicolaus Copernicus, was beginning to have funny ideas about whether the Sun really did go round the Earth.  This is a story I’ve already dealt with in Saving the Appearances (of Standard Finance). As I said there:

“In the end the battle over economics is a battle over power. When Martin Luther set in motion the Reformation by nailing his treatises to the cathedral door at Wittenberg he wasn’t just challenging the ideas of the established Church but seeking to undermine its power. War followed, because that’s what happens when established power centers come under threat; we shouldn’t expect any different in economics.” 

So let’s get this schism started.