Crime Against Humanity: Pensée Unique in Economics, 9

It has been said that the application of a technique is an art. And that no servomechanism will ever do, only you and I rolling up our sleeves. One of the reasons is that there is a gap between abstract concepts and real contingent circumstances, and we are called to the art of bridging it every single time. Every day we live that day as itself, not as a copy of the others.
Hence, when we apply a policy to a country, deductive as it may be, if we’re sensible and honest, we ought to monitor the feedback in order to adjust its application to the contingent circumstances. But Werner tells us, “Wherever the World Bank and the IMF became active – most of the developing world – they soon seemed to know the true problems of each country. Little local research was necessary to reach their conclusions. Switching the country name from an earlier study seemed to do much of the job, since the policy advice is highly predictable and appears to apply to all countries: structural reform to implement liberalisation, deregulation and privatisation, we are told, is the only path to prosperity.”
When a deductive policy is imposed not even just regadless of facts, of circumstances, but quite despite them, things obviously do not compute, and it becomes obvious that the real agenda is somewhat more in the province of betrayal than in that of help.

So much for the neoclassical approach. And it is quite meaningful to observe how its detachment from reality goes hand in hand with the virulence of its command.

Continuing to proceed through the jumble, the next issue under the neoclassical bonnet are its tenets.
One of the most typical dividing lines between a deductive, abstract, theoretical approach and an inductive, practical, empirical one corresponds to a difference found between the universe of ideas and the physical universe: absolutes. It has been observed how there exist no absolutes in the physical universe, and on the other hand it can be observed how absolutes, as abstract concepts, are a useful tool, but just as any tool they are intrinsically approximate, and then to be always used with a grain of salt.
Meaningfully, in light of this, the neoclassical tenets are founded on absolutes, absolutes with a definitely very scarce grain of salt.

Crime Against Humanity: Pensée Unique in Economics