It’s time to stop admiring Economics Nobel Laureates, really the field of Economics as a whole. There is no doubt that the best economists are spectacularly brilliant people, but 51 years after the First Nobel was awarded for Economics, all of the Third World is still the third world, wealth still comes only from creative minds in the technical and cultural fields applied to profit by good businessmen, and economists have no role except to sit in universities, central banks, and governmental organizations, and issue religious edicts of how the economy should be run by power hungry politicians.

Together economists and politicians make up the ruling structures of government in the world, but all they’ve managed to do is make Totalitarian China get phenomenally wealthy through expropriation of foreign intellectual property and causing the jobs of the working classes of all the Democracies to go to China, all under the mantra of “free trade makes thing better for everyone”. Which is a big pile of nonsense that is repeated as a religious truth by everyone whose job cannot be exported to China. All the economics big brains in the central banks and Ivy League universities didn’t see the 2008 financial crash coming, then didn’t then how to halt it except by bailing out the money bags financiers who caused it, who caused the economic hollowing out of the working class in the first place by exploiting the opportunities created by the economists.

The same economists who now have no idea, and indeed no interest in, how to halt the power that totalitarian China now holds over the economies and geostrategic security of the Freedom loving Democracies that created the havens of academic inquiry and discovery, including economics, in the first place. Nor do the economists have any ideas what to do about totalitarian states that dig up oil or mineral wealth and then buy out the government policies of Free Democracies where people actually have to apply their brains and labor to generate value. Nor do they have any answers of what to do about poverty and inequality that don’t, in the end, amount to some variation of the Marxist welfare state.

Developments in experimental economics? Give it a break. Government, being a vast bureaucracy, needs bureaucrats to make policy, and so needs a bunch of eggheads with degrees showing that they have the qualifications to make policy. That’s what economics is. A vast field of bureaucracy for a system of government that needs bureaucrats to pull the levers of the economy and look like they know what they’re doing.

But they don’t.

The 21st century is going to be a century of crisis, chaos, collapse, and conflict. And at the bottom of it all will be the failure of the global institutional system built by economists that generated a lot of wealth without caring about who got the wealth, how they got it, whether they should have, what it did to everyone else, and what happens when the reckoning for this bureaucratic sell out of ordinary voters in democratic comes due.

While India celebrates the 2019 Economics Nobel Prize out of the usual misplaced pride that Indians have about achievements that are not India’s, be in no doubt that the post World War II global order of the world built by economists is now breaking down because economists never accurately valued the worth of democracy and freedom, and the ordinary people in free democratic countries, as they set about engineering a vast global bureaucratic system of trade and governance.