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The Dismal Science’s Greatest Achievement: Unified Incompetence Through Total Disagreement

Buck Valor
Written by
Buck ValorPersiflating Non-Journalist
Thursday, August 21, 2025
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A cynical, high-contrast oil painting of two economists in tattered, expensive suits sitting in a sinking rowboat in the middle of a dark, stormy ocean. One is pointing East and the other West, both shouting with veins popping on their foreheads, while the boat is clearly going down. The water is made of shredded stock certificates and coins. Dark, moody, academic aesthetic.

The world is a burning dumpster fire, and the people we’ve hired to manage the flames are currently arguing over the chemical composition of the soot. The latest revelation from the ivory towers of academia—if one can call the bleeding obvious a revelation—is that economists disagree about everything. They are, in the delightful parlance of those who use words to hide a lack of utility, 'fissiparous.' It is a five-dollar word used to describe the fact that if you put three economists in a room, you will get four conflicting opinions and at least two demands for a taxpayer-funded research grant to study why they can’t agree.

Economics has long been referred to as the 'dismal science,' a term that is far too generous, as 'science' implies a fundamental relationship with reality and 'dismal' doesn't quite capture the sheer, soul-crushing futility of the enterprise. It is more akin to reading entrails, except the entrails are digital spreadsheets and the priests wear Brooks Brothers suits. The internal fractiousness of the discipline isn't a bug; it’s the primary feature. It allows for a state of perpetual plausible deniability. When the economy collapses, the Left-leaning Keynesians blame a lack of 'stimulus'—their euphemism for throwing money into a black hole—while the Right-leaning Austerity-fetishists claim we didn't starve the peasants quite enough to satisfy the invisible hand of the market. Neither side is ever wrong because the other side’s existence provides a convenient scapegoat for why their own deluded theories failed to materialize.

The 'fissiparousness' of the field is a testament to the fact that economics is less a discipline of study and more a collection of competing religions. On one side, we have the performative altruists of the Left, who believe that if we just manipulate enough variables and tax every breath taken by the middle class, we can achieve a utopian equilibrium where everyone is equally miserable. They view the economy as a giant, broken machine that only they, the enlightened technocrats, can fix with the strategic application of other people’s money. Their models are beautiful, intricate, and entirely useless because they fail to account for the fact that humans are not variables, but terrified, irrational apes driven by greed and panic.

On the other side of the aisle, we find the moronic greed-merchants of the Right. These are the people who treat the 'Market' as a sentient, benevolent deity that will solve all human ills if we simply stop regulating it. They speak of 'trickle-down' effects with the sincerity of a cult leader promising salvation in exchange for your life savings. To them, the disagreement within the field is merely proof that the 'wrong' people are in charge of the levers. They want to privatize the air and charge for the sunlight, convinced that the resulting 'efficiency' will somehow benefit the very people they are strip-mining for parts. Their disagreement with their peers is a badge of honor, a sign that they alone understand the 'natural law' of the jungle.

This academic civil war serves a very specific purpose for the ruling class: it ensures that no one is ever held accountable. When a policy fails spectacularly, there is always a chorus of 'experts' ready to explain that the failure wasn't due to the policy itself, but because it wasn't implemented purely enough, or because the opposition sabotaged it with their own 'fissiparous' counter-theories. It is a closed loop of intellectual masturbation that produces nothing of value while consuming vast quantities of public attention. We are expected to listen to these oracles as they debate the finer points of inflation targets and interest rate swaps, while the actual foundation of our society—real goods, real labor, real survival—is treated as a secondary concern to their theoretical squabbles.

The tragedy is that the public still looks to these people for guidance. We treat the latest 'consensus' or 'disagreement' among economists as if it were a weather report, failing to realize that these people can’t even agree if it’s raining while they’re standing in a downpour. Their discipline is built on the 'rational actor,' a mythical creature that doesn't exist in nature, yet they continue to build 800-page manifestos on its behavior. The disagreement is inevitable because their starting point is a lie. You cannot reach a consensus on how to navigate a ship when half the crew thinks the Earth is flat and the other half thinks the ocean is made of grape jelly.

In the end, the 'fissiparousness' of economists is just a high-brow way of saying they are guessing. They are guessing with our lives, our retirements, and our futures. They are the only professionals who can be wrong 100% of the time and still receive tenure, book deals, and consulting fees from the very governments they are helping to bankrupt. So, let them disagree. Let them retreat to their faculty lounges and argue until the heat death of the universe. Just don't make the mistake of thinking any of it matters. The only thing economists truly agree on is that they should be paid regardless of whether their advice leads to prosperity or a bread line.

This story is an interpreted work of social commentary based on real events. Source: The Economist

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