Economics as a science has run stuck on 2 of its major modern generalities,'rational' investors & 'perfectly efficient' markets

Anatole Kaletsky, in a major article in a UK online magazine Prospect, contributes a stunning set of thawts, "Goodbye, homo economicus" (Apr2k9). I shall quote only the tail-end of his piece here, but recommend a close reading of the entire piece to encounter its moments of truth.

Economics today is a discipline that must either die or undergo a paradigm shift—to make itself both more broadminded, and more modest. It must broaden its horizons to recognise the insights of other social sciences and historical studies and it must return to its roots. Smith, Keynes, Hayek, Schumpeter and all the other truly great economists were interested in economic reality. They studied real human behaviour in markets that actually existed. Their insights came from historical knowledge, psychological intuition and political understanding. Their analytical tools were words, not mathematics. They persuaded with eloquence, not just formal logic. One can see why many of today’s academics may fear such a return of economics to its roots.

Academic establishments fight hard to resist such paradigm shifts, as Thomas Kuhn, the historian of science who coined the phrase in the 1960s, demonstrated. Such a shift will not be easy, despite the obvious failure of academic economics. But economists now face a clear choice: embrace new ideas or give back your public funding and your Nobel prizes, along with the bankers’ bonuses you justified and inspired.

Related to Kaletsky's piece is a review in The New Republic:
[Judge] Richard A. Posner, "Shorting Reason," (Ap15,2k9) on the book by George A. Akerlof and Robert J. Shiller Animal Spirits: How Human Psychology Drives the Economy, and Why It Matters for Global Capitalism, (Princeton University Press, 264 pp., USA$24.95).

If you want to pursue these issues in conjunction with "Capitalism beyond the crisis," you can do so by reading Amartya Sen's essay of that title in The New York Review of Books (Mar26,2k9).

Reformational Christian philosophy has already discarded propositionalism in Bible reading (Dooyeweerd, Hart, ICS Toronto generally, etc), so why should not our economists and sociologists also do so? -- all the while struggling in search of Christian philosophy's relation to "Scriptural religion" (Vollenhoven, Hart again, and most recently, interestingly and conservingly Albert Wolters, "No Longer Queen: the theological disciplines and their sisters" which is downloadable in PDF format). So, it is no surprise that the leading philosophizing economist of this school of thawt, Dr Bob Goudzwaard, at the same time uses scripture-bases to movitate his discussion of economic-modal norms. While devoted to his contribution over a lifetime, I'm not so sure he and my discussion-partner sociologist Dr Bruce Wearne have remained reformationally realistic, in Robert Joudstra's sense, Recovering Christian Realism in "Terrifying Times". Or, perhaps I'm reading intertextually with the echoes of Rheinhold Niebuhr's christian realism.