The point of departure for this chapter is Richard Lipsey s (1973) once ubiquitous economics textbook that went under the title Positive Economics. This text represents the influential core of orthodox economics. It is likely that this, or similar economic texts were the undergraduate bibles of those representatives of the International Monetary Fund (IMF) who travel the world lecturing the poorest countries on the importance of a balanced State budget, the merits of privatization and tight monetary control.

The problem with this text was that it sold its approach positive economics as the only meaningful approach to economics. It elevated this approach to an orthodoxy that was eloquently critiqued by Omerod (1994) in The Death of Economics. In doing so it reduced economics to a set of theories laden with restrictive assumptions. The theory of perfect competition is a good example. The theories had to simplify because the actual real world of economics is too complex and messy to model otherwise. So the theories were constructed with many limiting assumptions that allowed them to function with mathematical precision. But of course the more assumptions that preceded theory building, the less useful the theories became in explaining or predicting real world behaviour. At the same time Positive Economics promoted the free market as a natural and irrefutable entity. It elevated it to the status of say gravity. That is something that was natural and that humans were subservient to. The counterpart to...