An Economic Joke

There's a well known joke about the core economic theories of modern orthodox neoclassical economics. When it's pointed out to neoclassical economists that their theories of a market economy fail to capture the workings of a real capitalist market economy, they respond with the following: the problem is not with our theories, but with reality - meaning that a real-world market economy like capitalism fails to behave as their models or theories predict. Thus, the implication is that the real world of an actual capitalist market economy must be fixed up in order for it to accurately reflect their 'sound' economic theories, rather than doing the opposite, which is to fix up their economic theories so they better reflect a real-world capitalist market economy.

This joke about the theories of modern orthodox neoclassical economics nevertheless captures the fundamental problem with modern mainstream economics: it's failure to see that science, in order for it to tell us something epistemically useful about the real world, must start from a theoretical point which is based on how the real world essentially is rather than a 'cooked up' version of an ideal world.

It's by this scientific approach that one is able to determine whether one's scientific theories of the real world represent as accurately as practicable the real world itself. If one's scientific theories of the real world fail to do so, then they either get revised until they match up with the reality of things, or they get abandoned altogether. However, what mustn't happen is that the would-be scientist ignores the real world itself, simply because it doesn't fit their theories about things. Apart from being bad-faith science, it simply doesn't get us any closer to the scientific truth of things - which presumably is one of the chief aims of science.