 In this lecture, our goal will argue that economics is not a science, it is a religion. On the one hand, economists describe their subject as a value-free science, which describes economic realities, but many different authors from many different perspectives have argued the opposite, that economics is a religion, it is a system of value, it's a value system, it's an ideology. So how can we decide among these two points of view? Useful method is to look at the history of the origins of the discipline. For our purposes, the crucial episode is a century of religious wars in Europe, which led to the realization by everybody that religion could not serve as a basis for a peaceful society. So the scholastic approach to building society based on the Bible was rejected and replaced by an alternative which started with the Enlightenment, a search for principles on which one could build a tolerant society. There was a long process of transition from a biblical Christianity-based society to a secular modern society in which a lot of things were reversed. Building the first of the new secular sciences to emerge was political science because that was of urgent importance, how to prevent wars, but also attitudes of society's change. So from the Christian idea that love of money is the root of all evil, to the modern idea based at the heart of economics is that lack of money is the root of all evil. And religion which used to serve as the foundation and basis of all knowledge was demoted to a private system of beliefs and a new, entirely new epistemology based on observations and religion, observations and reason was created. In all of these developments, the ideas of the Enlightenment philosophers about how we can build a tolerant society were very important. There is a lot of mythology which has been created about the Enlightenment as to how it led to freedom and democracy and all great things that modern society has. In fact, the reality is rather different. But the critical point that we want to extract from this is that the Enlightenment thinkers wanted to eliminate Christianity, reject it and to go beyond it, but they could not escape their heritage. And so Enlightenment combines explicit rejection of many elements of Christianity together with the implicit acceptance of many others. The crucial thing to understand about the Enlightenment or the age of reason is that reason itself is sterile, reason argues from some premises to conclusions and it cannot add information to what is contained in the premises. So when we say that reason leads us to such and such conclusion, what we really mean to say is that the premises from which we argue lead to this conclusion. Premises are often taken to be self-evident, so the role of the premises in getting to conclusions is not made explicit or highlighted. So the famous Cartesian reason that I think therefore I am, if you look at the premise, I think it already assumes the existence of the subject I, so the conclusion is already contained within the premise. This is the, all of reason is like that. And if we want to understand how modern economics is a religion, this is what we have to understand modern economics pretends to be rational, but this rationality comes to conclusions based on some hidden concealed assumptions. It is bringing these assumptions out that makes explicit the nature of economics as a religion. Basically the trick by which morality is concealed within economics is the use of the word rationality. The morality is a distinction between good and evil, but rationality is a standard to judge intelligent versus foolish behavior. Rationality leads to entirely different standards of behavior. So when we talk about making a promise, then it is immoral to reject or to go back on this promise, but according to economics, if you will gain advantage from breaking your promise, then it is rational to break the promise. And this is exactly the reasoning by which Machiavelli gave his advice to rulers of the country. There is no morality except for rational considerations of power. So the radical change which took place in attitudes towards money took the course of two centuries, but and there are many transitional points. You start out with the general attitude in Christianity that buying something and selling it for a higher price is immoral. You're making a profit, but for what? And so initial justification is because trade is necessary was that you are being paid for your time and effort involved in buying and selling. But later theologians came up with more sophisticated defenses that they took into account that you're taking risks and that you're providing service and that you have skills and that you have information. So all of these are basis. But the point to note here is not that what the justification is, but the fact that it is needed to justify making profits from trade during this period of transition. The economists use of the word reason for their religion creates a linguistic trap to oppose reason is to favor foolishness. So this is reflected in the title of a paper by Amartya Sen called rational fools in which he shows that what economists call rational behaviors would be very foolish in normal circumstances. But this is a problem that we cannot argue against reason. And so to escape this trap, we need to distinguish between economics notion of reason, which we will call irrationality and the ordinary language, which is rationality or just simply plain rationality because we want to recapture the use of rationality, which economists have rested away from us and called what we ordinary call irrationality. They have called this rationality. So in order to escape this trap, in order to be able to talk clearly about this issue, we need to distinguish between irrationality and ordinary language rationality. When we make this distinction, we one of the great insights of Karl Polanyi in the great transformation is that running capitalist economic society, the capitalist economic system requires a market society. And in a market society, market relationships are prioritized over social relationships. The society is embedded within the market. So what does this mean exactly? You can get clarity by looking at a simple examples. Suppose that a drug store owner has a vital life saving drug and somebody needs it to save his life, but he doesn't have the money to pay for it. So what should he do? Well, the market morality or market society, the drug owner is perfectly justified in withholding the drug because without being paid for it, there is no right money or the market relationship has precedence. In a traditional society, exactly the opposite is true. The human relationship between the drug store owner and the person in need takes precedence over the market relationship. So it would be considered very odious and inappropriate behavior for him to withhold the drug just because the person didn't have money to pay for it. So today, market rationality or economic rationality has taken over. And so it is considered rational to wage war to increase corporate profits. Corporations are achieving short-run profits while knowingly creating a climate catastrophe. It has been argued by Zygmunt Bowman at the Holocaust that the requirements of rationality and efficiency of modernity and the putting of these in the top position will lead to the idea that it is rational to burn millions of people if we think that this is what is required for the welfare of the remaining or the majority. So all of this shows that there is strong conflict between irrationality and ordinary rational. So we can conclude this talk by noting that if we equate irrationality with irrationality, then we will be able to understand how our equating opposites under the influence of economic theory is one of the causes of the climate catastrophe which looms over us.