A core damage of high-modernist neoclassical/neoliberal economics is that it has habituated us to the idea that social problems have technical solutions and that economics can be depoliticized — the Blairite 'third way' dream of using the state to regulate markets so efficiently that the state merely mends a presumptively mendable system.

Neoclassical reasoning is institutionalized across virtually every British and international economic agent: the Treasury Green Book is a neoclassical second-best framework defining decision-making across all government departments, international financial institutions use neoclassical reasoning, and central banks rely on dynamic stochastic general equilibrium models built on a 'representative agent' and rational-expectations models.

Closed-system deterministic machine models of the economy cannot work in a human society because that society is an open-ended system that cannot escape uncertainty: the world is always becoming something else through emergent novelty, complex systems and technological change, so no governing science could be valid for all times and places without godlike omniscience.

Soviet totalitarianism and British liberal democracy are politically opposite, but both are 'misadventures in high modernism' — late-19th/early-20th-century projects seeking methodologies to transcend the uncertainties of the social world and obtain definitive answers, and Britain has imposed a totalizing economic science on itself without physical coercion or revolution.

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.

The Treasury's computational general equilibrium models used to calculate tax breaks under Osborne originate with the Soviet economist Wassily Leontief, and cannot even bring financial markets into the picture because doing so is too complicated.

The solution is not to replace the old economic science with a new totalizing science ('the old science is dead, long live the new science') — philosophy of science says there is no such thing for the social world — but to embrace analytical pluralism: bringing different perspectives, ideas and solutions into the policy room would improve outcomes almost instantly because the current paradigm has been scraped to the bottom.

The real risk is that people conclude it is democracy, not the economy, that doesn't work — so the danger is that society gives up on democracy before it gives up on an economic paradigm that was misconceived from the beginning.

British capitalism today bears no resemblance to the promises of the Thatcher revolution: excessive financial extraction and the excessive power of the financial industry — which closed-system models cannot even integrate (the Treasury's computational general equilibrium models, originating with Soviet economist Wassily Leontief, leave financial markets out as too complicated) — alongside cost-of-living crisis, 4 million children in abject poverty, financialization and corporate state capture, none of which neoclassical economics can diagnose, yet which drive poverty and alienation from democracy.

Stalinist planned economics and the mathematical neoclassical economics underpinning neoliberal policy since 1979 are effectively mirror images: both are closed-system, deterministic 'machine models' of the economy that assume a fully efficient system is achievable (a perfect plan or a perfect market) and therefore converge on the same statecraft of quantification, output planning and forecasting.

Early neoclassical/mathematical economics was originally labelled 'social physics' because it copied Newtonian mechanics and swapped the concept of energy for utility; and contrary to leftwing caricature, many early neoclassicists were socialists, so neoclassicism is best understood as a methodology rather than an inherently right-wing doctrine.

Late-Soviet economists (Russian, Polish, Hungarian) spent the later decades of the USSR trying to mend the broken connections and solve information failures in a planning system that could never be made complete — and later generations of neoclassical economists are doing exactly the same thing, on the same misunderstanding that information failures can be solved in a world that is always becoming something else.

45 years of first-best neoliberal policy (privatization, deregulation) failed on the terms by which it was justified — these had effects but not the promised ones — and the subsequent generation (Blair, Cameron, US New Democrats, the European Commission) spent ~25 years trying to mend market failures, only to be baffled as institutions evolved dynamics and pathologies that neoclassical economics cannot even describe, let alone solve.

Rational expectations models began as a technical idea that everyone in the model shares the same knowledge of the system as the modeler — Thomas Sargent literally called this 'the communism of models' — using an idealized social planner, which embodies the assumption of a perfect coordination system where no information gets lost.

Neoclassical economics is not useless: it can be genuinely insightful for analyzing simple markets with repeated, isolable phenomena (such as asymmetries in contracting), rationalizing what happened or recurs in certain circumstances after the fact — but it cannot serve as a sufficient governing science, which is unsustainable both in philosophy of science and, judging by Britain's condition, socially and politically.

British political history maps onto Soviet decline: Thatcherism functioned like Leninism (revolutionary idealism that didn't work as supposed), Blairism like the reformist Khrushchevite phase of mending market failures, and the last 14 years of Conservative government like Brezhnev-era stagnation — a neotraditionalist phase that gives up real reform and just 'sings the old songs' hoping they work.

Neoclassical arguments are axiomatic-deductive arguments from assumption (logical reasoning), so they are as impossible to refute as they are to implement — unlike the scientific method of theorization from observation and continuous review — which is why they cannot be straightforwardly disproven yet cannot be made to work in the world.

Rachel Reeves was trained through the Bank of England, which is an essentially neoclassical institution, so the obstacle to change is political will: at what point she will declare that her training, the Treasury and her mainstream economic advice are not fit for purpose is a political decision, not a technical one.

Britain operates in an 'analytical monoculture' in economics, but a great deal of empiricist, social-purpose, inventive economic experimentation is emerging as a coping mechanism in cities and communities, rediscovering an approach that understands the economy as an ecosystem rather than a watch.

Brexit was the wrong diagnosis of a real crisis, and the real crisis was a crisis of the British state.