Marty Kienitz investigates the field of economics

After retiring, my late father spent a lot of time studying the field of economics in order to, I suppose, try to get some clarity through all the confusion and BS that people with various unspoken agendas keep pushing into it. In 2009 he summarized his early conclusions into a six page booklet called Making Sense of it All: Summarizing What I’ve Learned of Economics, which observed that the field was “in very deep trouble”, and by 2016 he produced a much deeper inquiry called Economics – Here’s My Take: A Survey of Economics by a Puzzled Outsider, about a hundred pages long in PDF form. (He later added a short list of errata rather than publishing a revised version.) I have converted those writings into responsive HTML format so they can be easily read here, incorporating his errata fixes and a bit of general typographical cleanup.

Here are all the links to Making Sense of it All:

• as a web page
• as a PDF
• his original MS Word doc

And here are the links to Economics – Here’s My Take:

• as web pages, with navigation between chapters
• as one tall web page
• his original PDF
• his errata list, as a Word doc

Here’s a sample quote, about competing schools of thought in the field:

“Each of them had a hand on the elephant, so to speak, insisting that their part was the whole. Worse yet, some of them had no grip on the elephant at all but claimed their description was the way the elephant ought to be.”

Yeah, the first thing anyone should learn about economics as a field of study is that though some evidence-based research does get done in it, the field consists mostly of politics rather than science — too much of the work in the field “is based on an ideology or world view that prevents an open-minded approach to its subject.” He also emphasized how, even without ideological bias coming into it, the field has clung to old simplistic conceptual models which have long since been proven to be invalid for describing the real world — ideas he sometimes called “just-so stories”, which stuck around partly because they could be handled with limited math, and partly because “they mistook beauty for truth.” And he discussed how, to this day, it continues to struggle with defining its own fundamentals, such as what exactly money is — a question “argued about through most of history.” (My own thoughts on that question, much more condensed, are here.)

I think these writings have insight and value, so I’m proud to preserve and share them here.