Peak Capitalism - economists are killing the planet

In this particular session, I want people to understand the main reasons that humans are committing collective suicide. It's because of worthless methodology on the part of the social sciences AND human nature.

The reason that Greenspan failed to understand the impact of peak oil on the economy is because his "methodology" prevented it. The economists must be denounced for their crimes against humanity and removed from their positions of influence. We could discuss this for days...

"Economists have become a plague as dangerous as rabbits, prickly pear or cane toads. Economists have become the cultural cane toads of Canberra, oozing over the landscape and endangering myriad indigenous species. Not only the economy but also mental health would be greatly improved if we could lift the fog of obfuscation on things economic. The first step is to take economists from their pedestal and to see them as the curiosities they are. The first step to reducing their power is to reduce their legitimacy. How is this to be achieved? First, economists' outpourings should, as a matter of principle, be met with laughter, derision, benign paternalism. They should cease to be employed as media commentators. In the long term they should cease to be hired. Let them be pensioned off and die out. Extinction is a worthy end for a profession whose brief is rotten to the core."
-- Dr. Evan Jones, Economics Department, University of Sydney, 1991

"[The Chicago School of Economics is] a great center of contemporary scholasticism. The economists working there and produced by it are as important to the stagnation of useful thought as the Schoolmen of the University of Paris were at the height of the Middle Ages Like that of the Paris scholastics, their mastery of highly complex rhetorical details obscures a great void at the centre of their argument. A large number of America's economic problems could be solved by shutting down the Chicago School of Economics. The purpose of closure would be simply to disentangle a tendentious ideology from its unassailable position within contemporary power structures. The same sort of liberating shock treatment was applied to European civilization in 1723 when the Society of Jesus (Jesuits) was disbanded. The effect was to set free the ideas of the Enlightenment."
-- John Ralston Saul, 1994