“Brother, can you paradigm?”

Anyone who gets the pun in the title is way too old. And anyone who thinks that economists can solve our economic problems is way too naïve. In fact, the title is a hint of what will happen if we follow their prescriptions.

Economics is a self-perpetuating science, and economists only found themselves in high demand when governments began playing fast and loose with the natural workings of the market. Yet central control of the economy is impossible because an economy is made up of people, whose behaviour is often irrational and always unpredictable.

That’s where economists step in. They earn their keep by claiming the clairvoyant ability to predict economic trends, to which end they act like gnostic dervishes who get a following by muttering abracadabra.

‘Paradigm’ is one of the arrows in their quiver of recondite terms, jagged graphs, incomprehensible models and impenetrable statistics. They’ll rain those arrows on anyone who dares suggest that they should get out of people’s hair and just let them get on with what they already know how to do: make a living.

People don’t need pedigreed help in that area. The help they do need is to be found in churches, museums, concert halls and libraries. At least that’s where they should look, even at the risk of a let-down. What they do in the marketplace is strictly derivative.

Yet somehow the Marxist idea of the primacy of economics has taken hold, and it unites the seemingly incompatible political extremes, as personified by Marx and Hayek or Keynes and Friedman. They may all be saying different things, but they share a common premise.

Nationalise the means of production, claim the socialists, and everything else will follow. Socialism good, capitalism bad. Privatise the means of production, object the libertarians, and everything else will follow. Capitalism good, socialism bad. Like Orwell’s animals, both species reduce everything to a single issue. They just can’t agree on the number of legs.

Yet economic activity reflects merely a small part of an individual’s essence, and it would be far-fetched to believe that it’s divorced from all other parts. Of course it isn’t, but that shouldn’t be understood simplistically.

When performing on the economic stage most people will behave differently from the way they act at home or with their friends. However, if we know a person well, we’ll have no difficulty in finding a link between the two behavioural modes.

The link is the person himself, his character, culture, ideas, aspirations, religion if any, temperament – even at times appearance and other physical characteristics. And if we consider the totality of what makes a human being human, then we may well reach the conclusion that his economic performance is the easiest part to understand.

That makes economics the simplest of all the sciences devoted to the study of human behaviour. Just consider this. Neuropsychologists, neurophysiologists and other behavioural scientists have spent billions in whatever currency you care to name on trying to understand the human mind. Yet, after all those Decades of the Brain and Genome Projects, they still don’t even know what the mind is, how it works, what produces and constitutes a thought, or whether consciousness will ever be describable in any physical or biological terms.

But the results aren’t all negative. At least all those neurosciences, though largely failing in their declared mission, have succeeded in proving that they are indeed sciences.

They have passed the critical test of going beyond common sense. According to Lewis Wolpert, a serious scientist but a dreary populariser of atheism, real, especially modern, science always does that. In fact, it may well be an essential part of its definition.

If we look at photons getting to us from faraway stars by unerringly and, on the face of it, rationally choosing the shortest path of least resistance for millions of years; if we even begin, to the best of our limited ability, to consider the implications of quantum mechanics and the theory of relativity (and how the two may be at odds); if we ponder universal constants or modern genetics with its undecipherable codes; we’ll see that common sense will help us grasp none of these. It will mislead, not lead.

Economics is different. It not only doesn’t go beyond common sense but invariably and miserably fails when trying to do so.

Whenever a professional economist starts using terms and concepts that go beyond the understanding of someone with a decent secondary (or better still, primary) education, then we know that the wool is being pulled over our eyes. The chap isn’t trying to elucidate the issue. He is trying to obscure it, and probably for nefarious reasons.

The founder of modern economics, Adam Smith, never had to do this. His books rely on plain common sense to explain a very basic problem: how markets can help people to make a living (spoiler alert: by not letting governments get in the people’s way). But for modern economists, economics is too simple to understand.

One can draw two conclusions from this: First, if our definition of a science includes as a necessary constituent its going beyond common sense, and if economics not only does not but indeed must not do so, then economics isn’t a science. Second, economics has an off-chance of becoming a science if it’s treated as a study of merely a single aspect of life that’s closely intertwined with others, and is only ever pursued in conjunction with them.

That’s why, if we wish to get to the bottom of economic hardships, economics can be but a small part of things to consider. Therefore, we either abandon the project before we have even started or we must delve deeper.

I can’t do in a short article what I once did in a book (The Crisis Behind Our Crisis). All I can do here is single out one aspect highlighted in Max Weber’s book The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism.

Weber’s brilliant, if debatable, analysis hinged on the causative link between the Reformation and capitalism, both its rise and spread. Yet capitalism, narrowly defined as the use of one’s own or borrowed capital to achieve economic ends, had been spreading steadily throughout the Middle Ages – in spite of the variously vigorous resistance on the part of the church. Granted, there is no denying that capitalism benefited from the Reformation. But was it caused by it?

The answer is probably no, and Weber tacitly acknowledged as much. But neither is this a case of a simple coincidence in time.

Witness the fact that even today Protestant countries boast a per capita GDP 1.5 times higher than in Catholic countries, three times higher than in Orthodox ones, and five times higher than in Muslim lands – this despite an ocean of petrodollars sloshing underfoot in the largest Orthodox country and quite a few Muslim ones.

This hints at an indisputable causative chain. What people believe affects what they think, and what they think affects what they do. This chain demonstrates the primacy of faith over economics; of thought over action; of mind over body.

That’s why, contrary to the popular misapprehension, theology and philosophy are real sciences because they uncover the first causes of human behaviour. Economics, on the other hand, is a dubious science because, even at its best, it merely records what people have always known.

And at its worst – which nowadays means at its usual – it’s not a science at all.