Dangerous Pseudoscience:
Why Market Economics Is Not Economics
Peter Joseph is a filmmaker & author; host of the podcast Revolution Now! and one can support his work through Patreon.
Of all the distorted realities produced by the irrational thought and behavior that now define so-called “modern” culture, nothing is more disturbing than the realization that our dominant mode of survival—economic survival—is rooted in what may be the most dangerous pseudoscience ever created: markets.
The delirium is astonishing. The disorder is obvious. And frankly, it is embarrassing. One can only hope that if extraterrestrial observers exist, they keep their distance—not out of fear, but out of disbelief at how absurd, self-destructive, and fragile humanity’s economic operating system has become.
We have organized the provisioning of life itself around a framework that dismisses the physical conditions of survival, ignores ecological limits, sidelines basic natural science, and replaces common-sense resource management with a layered mess of abstractions.
At its root, this system concerns itself with one thing and one thing only: the movement of money and the dynamics of exchange. That is the core concern. Nothing else is structurally prioritized. To call what is, in essence, an abstracted accounting ideology “economics” is not only misleading—it is intellectually indefensible.
Market economics does not begin with the Earth. It does not begin with materials, energy, design constraints, waste, or long-term viability. It begins with prices—symbols detached from physical reality—and then attempts to retrofit the world to justify them. In doing so, it systematically excludes the very variables that actually determine whether a society can survive.
Do this:
Find a group of elementary school children—children who have not yet been polluted by market-rooted economic theory, business-school mythology, or the belligerent sloganeering in favor of “capitalism”—and ask them a few basic questions:
Where do resources come from?
What happens when they run out?
How should we use them so everyone has enough?
What should we do with waste?
Should we design things to last, or to be thrown away?
Etc.
You will find, almost without exception, that these children respond with answers rooted in intuition, balance, and physical reality. They understand instinctively that resources come from the Earth, that they are finite, that they serve particular purposes, and that waste is a problem. They recognize that cooperation and efficiency matter. They grasp—without formal training—that using things wisely, with stewardship and scientific awareness, is preferable to using more things for the sake of “growth.” They intuitively understand that destroying the conditions of survival itself makes no sense.
In other words, they reason economically in a way that is more grounded, more rational, and more aligned with reality than many PhD-credentialed market economists.
The unspoken, taboo fact is this: true economics deals with ecology, design, recycling, energy systems, technical labor organization, and the material constraints of the physical world. It is a discipline rooted in engineering logic and systems thinking. It asks how finite resources can be intelligently allocated to meet human needs over time without undermining the ecological foundations that make production possible in the first place.
What we instead call “economics” today—market economics—is a pseudoscience devoted almost entirely to abstractions layered upon abstractions, concerned not with real provisioning, but with the movement of money inside artificial market structures.
What Economics Actually Means
The word economy comes from the Greek oikonomia, meaning the management of the household. This is not a metaphor; it is a functional definition. A household has limited resources, limited labor capacity, and ongoing needs. Good management means balancing inputs and outputs, minimizing waste, and ensuring sustainability over time.
No rational household incentivizes its members to consume endlessly simply to justify continued production. No household measures success by how fast money circulates between family members. No household celebrates growth for its own sake while ignoring depletion, exhaustion, or collapse.
And yet this is precisely what modern market economics celebrates at the societal scale.
True economics must grapple with the actual physical realities of production. It must ask where materials come from, how they are transformed, what energy inputs are required, what waste is generated, and what long-term consequences result from these processes. It must deal with ecology, because all production occurs within ecological systems. That is the foundation of any honest economic calculation. It must deal with design, because efficiency, durability, and reuse matter far more than sales volume. And it must deal with labor, because human effort is finite—and increasingly replaceable through automation.
In other words, economics is inseparable from engineering and systems science. It can only exist as a legitimate discipline when grounded in the properties of the real, material world, accounting for systemic interactions, feedback effects, and long-term outcomes rather than short-term monetary flows.
Now pick up any standard economics textbook assigned to college students.
Do you see a section on the natural regeneration rates of rainforests in the context of timber extraction? Do you see a systems-level analysis of how removing trees alters soil chemistry, water cycles, regional climate stability, and species interdependence? Do you see an examination of how biodiversity loss feeds back into human food security, disease vulnerability, or long-term survival?
No—you don’t.
And the reason is simple: if you did, you would be reading a genuine work of economics.
Instead, what you will find in Economics 101 is noise—layered abstractions about supply and demand curves, imaginary equilibria, rational actors, price signals, and efficiency myths, all detached from physical reality. You will read equations that never mention energy, models that ignore waste, and graphs that pretend ecosystems are optional variables. You will be taught to believe that prices somehow encode all relevant information, even as the real world degrades beneath the math.
This is not the study of an economy. It is the study of market behavior under artificial constraints, presented as universal truth. And the more one internalizes this abstraction, the less capable one becomes of understanding how real economies actually function—or fail.
That is why market economics can be taught for decades while remaining blind to collapse. It does not look at the world. It looks at its own symbols—and calls that science.
No.
The Fatal Narrowing of the Discipline
It is difficult to pinpoint exactly when everything became so absurd, but somewhere along the way economics underwent a profound intellectual narrowing. Political economy—the study of production, distribution, and social organization—was gradually replaced by market theory, which redefined the economy as nothing more than a set of price-mediated exchanges between abstract actors.
This narrowing hid behind one of the most delusional attributes ever assigned to markets: “freedom.”
Ah yes—freedom. Freedom from material limits. Freedom from ecological accountability. Freedom from understanding how the real world actually works.
In this reframing, biophysical limits were excluded from economic calculation except in the abstracted form of “scarcity,” embedded within the infamous supply-and-demand equation. In practice, this equation operates blindly. “Supply” is reduced to what exists after production, regardless of ecological cost. “Demand” is reduced to purchasing power rather than actual human need.
Nearly one billion people today suffer from inadequate nutrition, yet they exert no influence on demand curves because they lack money. Their needs are economically invisible. This alone exposes the moral and analytical bankruptcy of the framework.
Likewise, energy came to be treated as an external input rather than a core constraint. Environmental damage was labeled an “externality”—a term that itself reveals the problem. Design quality, durability, and waste reduction became irrelevant so long as goods could be sold. Human needs were flattened into “preferences.” Social stability was reduced to employment statistics.
The market itself was elevated to a near-mystical status, portrayed as a self-correcting, information-processing entity capable of optimizing outcomes through price signals alone. This belief persists despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary.
Prices do not reflect ecological cost. They do not account for long-term damage. They do not signal systemic risk. They do not optimize for human well-being. They reflect only what can be paid for under existing power structures.
Dangerous Pseudoscience
A science must meet certain criteria. It must be empirically grounded. Its assumptions must be testable. Its models must be falsifiable. Its predictions must meaningfully correspond to reality. Market economics fails on all counts.
Its foundational assumptions—rational actors, efficient markets, equilibrium tendencies—are demonstrably false, yet they persist because the models built upon them are internally consistent. This is the hallmark of pseudoscience: coherence within a closed system, divorced from empirical reality.
When market models fail to predict crises, recessions, environmental collapse, or inequality, the failure is never attributed to the model itself. Instead, blame is shifted to “exogenous shocks,” poor policy, or insufficient market freedom. The theory is never wrong; reality simply failed to cooperate.
Worse still, market economics routinely treats its own abstractions as natural laws. Supply-and-demand curves are presented as immutable features of human behavior rather than artifacts of a specific institutional framework. This conflation of constructed systems with natural phenomena is profoundly unscientific.
What market economics actually studies is not the economy, but the behavior of money within a particular rule set. That may be useful for traders, investors, and financiers—but it tells us almost nothing about how to intelligently organize production in a finite world.
The Cult of Growth
As I have talked about before at length, perhaps the most dangerous confusion in modern thought is the equation of money with economic health. Gross Domestic Product, for instance, measures the total monetary value of transactions within a country. It does not distinguish between constructive and destructive activity. A forest fire that destroys homes and infrastructure, followed by reconstruction, increases GDP. A medical crisis caused by pollution increases GDP. Planned obsolescence increases GDP.
By this logic, failure is success so long as it generates spending.
Money moving faster is treated as prosperity. But money is not food. It is not housing. It is not clean water or breathable air. It is an accounting system—a symbolic medium of exchange that tells us nothing about whether real human needs are being met efficiently or sustainably.
An economy can be growing financially while collapsing materially. Market economics has no mechanism to meaningfully address this contradiction because it does not measure what matters.
Market systems are structurally addicted to growth. This is not a cultural preference; it is a mathematical necessity. Debt-based money creation, profit requirements, and employment dependence all demand continuous expansion. Without growth, the system contracts—and contraction is treated as failure regardless of whether material needs are already met. This growth imperative directly contradicts ecological reality.
No physical system grows indefinitely. Every ecosystem operates within limits, seeking dynamic balance rather than endless expansion. Yet market ideology treats balance as stagnation and sustainability as inefficiency.
At the household level, this logic would be considered insane. No one believes a successful family is one that doubles its consumption every year, depletes its resources, and produces endless waste simply to keep everyone “employed.”
But at the macro level, this insanity is normalized, institutionalized, and defended by economists who rarely confront its ecological impossibility.
In systems-science terms, this is a conflict of recursion. The rules governing the macro system directly violate the constraints that apply at every lower level of organization. The household, the community, the ecosystem—all require balance, feedback, and restraint to remain viable. Yet the larger economic system is designed to override those same constraints, demanding perpetual expansion regardless of material limits.
A system that cannot apply its own survival logic across scales is not adaptive—it is pathological. When the macro layer forces behavior that would destroy the micro layers, collapse is not an accident; it is the expected outcome. Growth, under such conditions, is not a sign of health, but of systemic instability—a positive feedback loop accelerating toward failure.
What markets call “success” is, in ecological terms, overshoot. And overshoot does not end in equilibrium. It ends in correction.
Expertise Without Substance
Because market economics is focused almost entirely on financial abstraction, its practitioners are uniquely unqualified to solve real-world problems.
Climate change? The response is carbon markets and pricing mechanisms that commodify destruction rather than eliminate it. Automation and labor displacement? Create new jobs, regardless of whether they are necessary or meaningful. Resource depletion? Raise prices and let scarcity “signal” adjustments after damage is done.
Every problem is filtered through the same lens: how can this be monetized?
True expertise in economics would require understanding material flows, energy constraints, design optimization, systems feedback, and ecological thresholds. It would require collaboration with engineers, ecologists, and systems scientists. Market economists are rarely trained in any of these domains.
They may be experts in “markets”—but not in economies.
Economics as Engineering
If we strip away ideology and return to first principles, economics becomes something far more practical—and far more honest.
The real questions are simple:
What do people need to live well?
What resources are available?
What are the most efficient ways to transform those resources into usable goods and services?
What are the ecological costs of those processes?
How can waste be minimized or eliminated?
How can labor be reduced through intelligent design and automation?
These are engineering questions. They do not require price signals. They require data, design, feedback, and coordination. They require systems that optimize for outcomes rather than profits.
An economy designed this way would prioritize durability over sales, access over ownership, and balance over growth. It would treat technology as a means of reducing labor rather than creating artificial employment. It would measure success by quality of life and ecological stability, not by transaction volume.
Why the Illusion Persists
Market economics persists not because it works, but because it legitimizes existing power structures. It provides intellectual cover for inequality, environmental destruction, and inefficiency by framing them as unavoidable outcomes of “natural” market forces. Abstract models protect real interests. They deflect responsibility. They allow systemic failure to be treated as unfortunate rather than designed.
In truth, the power system markets create is arguably even worse than the so called “command” economies of the former USSR and beyond by which markets are supposed to be antithetical. Markets produce rigid, constant power hierarchies.
Real economics—grounded in physical reality—would demand systemic change. It would force us to confront the irrationality of profit-driven production, the redundancy of much labor, and the incompatibility of endless growth with a finite planet. It would also end the power structure that is not only tyrannical against human society itself, but tyrannical against the entire ecosystem by which we survived as a species.
That is why it is resisted. The winners of the market game are the ones in power and they are almost invariably sociopathic, as an aside.
Naming the Problem
So, again: Market economics is not economics. It is a belief system about money movement masquerading as science. It manages symbols instead of systems. It debates prices while ignoring physics. It treats abstraction as reality and reality as an externality.
Until we reclaim the meaning of economics, we will continue to mismanage the very foundations of human survival to our demise.
If your “economics” cannot explain ecology, waste, energy, and design efficiency, it is not a science.
It is a power-rooted ideology and religion.
And the longer we pretend otherwise, the higher the cost will be. I encourage people to learn about Integral in this regard as we have to start somewhere by building a method for true economic calculation and organization.
Peter Joseph is a filmmaker & author; host of the podcast Revolution Now! and one can support his work through Patreon.
Nice take down. Peel back the layers and you'll always find hierarchies defending their existence. We hurt ourselves so the rulers can continue to rule.
The externality framing is perfect, calling ecological damage an "externality" admits the framework cant handle reality. The elementary school thought experiment works because kids haven't been taught to confuse money movement with provisioning, they intuitively grasp that resources come from earth not from exchange. The recursion conflict you describe, where macro rules violate micro survival logic, is why every attempt at "green growth" ends up as accounting tricks rather than actual degrowth. I've watched environmental economists try to price carbon and biodiversity as if assigning numbers fixes systems failure when really it just monetizes collapse while pretending markets can optimize what they systematicaly exclude from calculation.