The mainstream (Blairite) economic tradition treats neoclassical economics not as literal description but as a 'second best' scientific heuristic for diagnosing and mending market failures — fixing monopoly, asymmetric contracting, or pricing nature to solve climate — but the idea that you can mend market failures is a fallacy and a category error: it confuses a logically valid model with something reproducible in the social world, falsely assuming each fix moves society toward a horizon of perfectly competitive markets.