Economics is a political science. In the 18th and 19th centuries the discipline was in fact known as ‘political economy’. The earliest economists were all focused on policy and politics and right into the middle of the 20th century they grappled with real-life problems. When political economy entered the ivory towers of academia it was reshaped by mathematics and statistics and became an increasingly esoteric discipline.
It was the economic crisis of the interwar years of the last century, the 1920s and 1930s, that elevated the status of economists from that of problem-solvers to that of. . .
