Both ecology and economics have emerged from the same roots – "oikos", the Greek word for household. As long as economics was focused on the household, it recognised and respected its basis in natural resources and the limits of ecological renewal. It was focused on providing for basic human needs within these limits. Economics as based on the household was also women-centered. Today, economics is separated from and opposed to both ecological processes and basic needs. While the destruction of nature has been justified on grounds of creating growth, poverty and dispossession has increased. While being non-sustainable, it is also economically unjust.

Meanwhile, the demands of the current model of the economy are leading to resource wars oil wars, water wars, food wars. There are three levels of violence involved in non-sustainable development. The first is the violence against the earth, which is expressed as the ecological crisis. The second is the violence against people, which is expressed as poverty, destitution and displacement. The third is the violence of war and conflict, as the powerful reach for the resources that lie in other communities and countries for their limitless appetites.

Nobel-prize winning economists Joseph Stiglitz and Amartya Sen have admitted that GDP does not capture the human condition and urged the creation of different tools to gauge the wellbeing of nations.

Friedman’s positivism states that the realism of assumptions does not matter: it has no relation whatever to the acceptability of a theory or its derived hypotheses. As Friedman put it, “[T]ruly important and significant hypotheses will be found to have assumptions that are wildly inaccurate descriptive representations of reality.” The only acceptable test of a theory “is comparison of its predictions with experience.” There are at least three serious problems with this method. First, if patently false assumptions are adopted, as in efficient financial market theory, and impeccable logic is used to deduce hypotheses from them, they cannot—as a matter of logic—be accurate reflections of reality. Fairy-tale assumptions can only generate fairy-tale hypotheses.

virtually any hypothesis can be shown to be statistically significant if enough different regressions are run.

The tenets of positivism require that the CAPM should be rejected. However, financial economists kept mining the data in an endless effort to find econometric results that fit the theory. Meanwhile, CAPM sustained its canonical status and efficient market theory remained unscarred in spite of its lack of empirical support.

The answer is that the economics profession is committed ideologically to a defense of the proposition that financial markets are efficient, yet it is impossible to derive this proposition from a realistic assumption set.

Positivism is the magic that makes it possible to construct a “scientific” defense of the proposition that free-market capitalism has no serious flaws and dangers.

Many academics support open access as the creation of a commons, but it is to be a commons open to private appropriation. The costs of investment in library and other curriculum resources are immediately reduced for new entrants. The playing field, then, is not levelled, but is heavily tilted towards for-profit providers.

But here we confront a paradox. Where the argument about students involves the notion that there should not be a direct public subsidy of a private beneficiary, the situation with regard to the impact agenda is reversed. Here it seems that the Government’s view is that there should not be public funding, unless there is a private beneficiary and that beneficiary should not pay.

It is publicly-funded ‘blue-skies’ research that has generated the innovations that have been most significant for subsequent product developments. It is the public (through funding) which bears the risk while private interests accrue the rewards. However, the effectiveness of blue-skies research is put under pressure by attempts to shorten the product cycle.

Of course, subsumption to the market requires a strong state and this provides a role for knowledge, but it is a knowledge of a very specific kind. Since neo-liberal public reason is based upon a ‘fiction’ of market rationality, various kinds of social actions (especially, collective ones and those based upon weakness of will) appear as distortions that are the obstacle to the rational dispositions that markets facilitate. Thus, the social as ‘residuum’ becomes the object of various kinds of behavioural, ‘anti-social’, sciences (primarily organized through a combination of economics, psychology and cognitive neuro-science), in contrast to the ‘structural’ social sciences.

As so often happens during times of economic crisis, an entirely new logic is emerging on the back of neoliberalism. At the core of this logic is a new vision of the individual, who is acting partly in a calculating economic fashion, but partly in a social, habitual fashion. When the two come into conflict, as arguably occurred in the financial sector, the results can be disastrous.

One of the most striking findings from the new science of well-being (admittedly noticed by Sigmund Freud a century earlier) is that work is an indispensable condition of human happiness.

From this emerging ‘post-neoliberal’ perspective, individual choice and market prices are no longer altogether to be trusted. Especially where physical and mental health are concerned, there is a growing sense that experts need to teach individuals what is good for them in their day-to-day lives.

The human mind, with all its self-destructive and herdlike tendencies, is now the territory into which economic policymakers are edging.

But it is precisely because of this culture that governments are searching for justifications to set limits, to identify bad choices and promote well-being.

It’s important to stress – as Philip Mirowski does in his new book, Never Let a Serious Crisis Go to Waste – that neoliberals were never hostile to the state, which they understood as a necessary source of coercion, for the purposes of preventing political upheaval.

Hayek would be distressed to know that in recent years, there has been an explosion of new types of accounting, governance and policy intervention which come dressed in the rhetoric of the ‘social’. Social enterprise, social media, social indicators, social impact bonds, social neuroscience.

I would suggest that, lying between these two interpretations, is a third option: that neoliberalism is being reinvented in ways that incorporate social logic, as a means of resisting critique and delaying crisis.

Without other people to guide and support them, provide norms and examples, they start to behave in ways that are self-destructive and destabilizing. This is the central insight of behavioural and happiness economics, which are achieving growing influence in policy-making circles right now.

The ‘social’ is brought back in as a way of providing support, such that individuals can continue to live the self-reliant, risk-aware, healthy lifestyles that neoliberalism requires of them.

At present, the digital tools used to analyse social life are in their infancy, and are largely attracting interest from marketing firms. But new techno-utopian policy visions, of ‘smart cities’ and digital tracking of health behaviours, look set to make pattern recognition and relationship management a key purpose of government. This represents the coming of what Geoff Mulgan has termed the ‘relational state’, or what I have previously described as ‘neocommunitarianism’

But this misses the logic of the emerging technical apparatus of government. Where neoliberalism integrates the logic of the social, it is precisely relationships between actors that are being observed and measured, and not the actors themselves. It is in correlations and patterns where value lies in a 21st century Big Data society, and not in the properties or preference of individuals, as was the case in a 20th century statistical and market society. And it is in the identification of hitherto invisible relationships that networked digital media holds out promise for security agencies. There is nothing innocent about meta-data.

In an effort to stave off their opponents, political movements can often end up stealing their clothes. Britain’s Labour Party arguably delivered a better version of Thatcherism than the Conservative Party was ever able to.

Neoliberalism’s abiding passion was always to destroy socialism, but in practice it may have ended up with far more of the technocratic elements of ‘actually existing’ state socialism than its ideologues could ever imagine (as I discuss here). When one considers our current predicament, in which our social and private lives are subjected to relentless quantification and optimization, the following prediction looks prescient: “the whole of society will have become a single office and a single factory”. This was in fact expressed as an optimistic vision of what a good society might look like in the future. And the visionary was none other than Vladimir Lenin.

The problem is not mathematics as such, but the junk economics and junk statistics used by the mathematicians who have captured the discipline of economics. For contrast, one need only turn to the 19th century’s rich toolbox of economic concepts developed to analyze today’s most pressing problems.

The overburden of public debt prompted Adam Smith to comment that year that no government ever had repaid its debts, and to propose means to keep it in check by freeing the American colonies that were a major source of conflict with France, for instance, and most of all, by paying for wars out of current taxation so that populations would feel their immediate cost rather than running into debt to international bankers such as the Dutch.

The early 19th-century French reformer St. Simon proposed that banks shift from making straight interest-bearing loans to “equity” loans, taking payment in dividends rather than stipulated interest charges so that debt service would be kept within the means to pay. (Islamic law already had banned interest.) This became the inspiration for the industrial banking policies developed in continental Europe later in the century. St. Simon influenced Marx, whose manuscript notes for what became Vol. III of Capital and Theories of Surplus Value collected what he read from Martin Luther to Richard Price on how debts multiplied by purely mathematical laws independently of the “real” economy¹s ability to produce a surplus. The classical concept of productive credit was to provide borrowers with the means to pay. Unproductive debts had to be paid out of revenue obtained elsewhere.

Interest paid by consumers was treated as a psychological choice, while industrial profit was treated as a return for the widening time it presumably took to produce capital-intensive goods and services. The ideas of “time preference” and the “roundabout” cycle of production were substituted for the simpler idea of charging a price for credit without any out-of-pocket cost or real risk undertaken by bankers. The world in which economic theorists operated was becoming increasingly speculative and hypothetical.

After the Napoleonic wars ended in 1815, Britain’s leading bank spokesman, David Ricardo, applied the concept of economic rent to the land in the process of arguing against the agricultural tariffs (the protectionist Corn Laws) in his 1817 Principles of Political Economy and Taxation. His treatment deftly sidestepped what had been the “original” discussion of rentier income squeezed out by the financial sector.

Where only transactions for money are recognised as belonging to "the economy", the vast amount of unpaid labour – as conducted for instance in families and local areas – goes uncounted and unvalued. We need to question that familiar categorisation of the economy as a space into which people enter in order to reluctantly undertake unwelcome and unpleasing "work", in return for material rewards which they can use for consuming.

Above all, we need to bring economic vocabulary back into political contention, and to question the very way we think about the economy in the first place. For something new to be imagined, let alone to be born, our current economic "common sense" needs to be challenged root and branch.

Another phase of thinking was more ontological than conceptual. These thinkers wanted to make it clear that social things, causes, and structures depended on the activities of individuals and nothing else.

There is one aspect of the tradition that I haven't mentioned yet: the idea that we can carve out the individual as separate from and prior to the social -- a view sometimes referred to as "atomistic".

In my view, the only claims about methodological individualism that seem unequivocally plausible today are the ontological requirements -- the various formulations of the notion that social things are composed of the actions and thoughts of individuals and nothing else. This implies as well that the supervenience claim and the microfoundations claim are plausible as well.