Indeed, I might present much of the argument along these ‘economics as usual’ lines.
But doing that makes part of the problem go away. We no longer see the dead of the two World Wars, the hungry of the Great Depression, the ruined lives of the Great Stagflation. We no longer see the devastation in Russia and many of the Eastern European Countries in the first decade after the Fall of the Berlin Wall. Closing our eyes to these issues, would be closing our eyes to the evidence for the need for an Economic Supreme Court.
The critical observation is: If economics would not confront the serious problems of mankind, it would lose it relevance to democratic policy making, and would rather become disinformation and a veil for anti-democratic policy making. It would become an accomplice in economic policy stagnation.
10. Four empirical cases
If economics is a science, then it must regard facts as sacred.
Many economists don’t quite understand this. When they see some unpleasant facts, they run, and start studying something else. Or they live in the corridors of power, and - like politicians - massage the facts, and make those fit the mold of the times. But running from a scary fact shows only a partial understanding of their importance. The proper attitude is to stare at the facts till they don’t go away and till they aren’t scary anymore, and then adjust theory to fit them.
Sometimes it is said that ‘facts’ don’t say much, but that it is the theory that makes them tick. People have lived for ages with the ‘facts’ that the moon is 2D round and shows stages of illumination, but it took them almost as long to accept 3D roundness of heavenly bodies as a theory. Admittedly, it is hard to impossible to pinpoint a ‘fact’ without also invoking theoretical concepts. But it would be wrong to switch to the view that ‘everything is theory’. Facts do exist, they can bite, and economists can be scared by them.
It is scary to economists that economic disaster can be related to the role of economics and economists.
At a crucial moment in his life J.M. Keynes was what we nowadays would be calling a ‘whistleblower’. As a civil servant and senior Treasury representative he served at the Versailles negotiations after the First World War. At a certain moment he resigned, and wrote The Economic Consequences of the Peace (1919). Many people thought that he should have kept silent given his position as (ex-) civil servant, and perhaps this played a role in his never becoming a full professor. I don’t have the intention to resolve this issue. But a valid question is: Would it not have been better if we had had Economic Supreme Courts at that time, that because of their scientific agenda would have put Keynes’s analysis up for discussion, that would have given him more protection, and that would have forced the other branches to answer to some questions ?