this post was submitted on 26 Jan 2026
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To be fair, that's like 150 years old, back when they believed in spontaneous generation, and the idea that continents move was absurd and crazy.
And yet the global economy is still operating on the same basic assumptions...
They've been made even worse by further developments of those basic assumptions as expounded by neoliberalism and reaganomics, but the underlying premises are still the same.
The global economy is definitely not being run by economists or anything particularly close to prescribed economic principles. Most countries are being run by some combination of authoritarian and/or populist governments whose economic policy is crafted to benefit either a small ruling class, or to win elections (voted on largely by people who don’t understand economics).
The most obvious example of this is the United States, which is the single largest national economy, and which keeps instituting tariffs despite “tariffs = almost always bad” being one of the first and most foundational tenets of macro econ.
The global economy is being run by capitalist oligarchs, whose central premises for existing are based on classical economic theories (private ownership of capital, extraction of resources, and exploitation of labor), their operational strategies are based on classical economic theories (infinite pursuit of growth at all costs, externalizing risks while internalizing profits, quarterly profit margins being the sole indicator of growth, cutting costs to minimize expenses and manufacturing scarcity to maximize pricing, etc.), and the policies meant to regulate and/or stimulate economic activity are based on classical economic theories (austerity for the poor, supply-side "trickle-down" economics for the rich including tax breaks, subsidies, and bailouts).
The tariffs are an exception attributable to the overt buffoonery of an extortionist grifter running the show. It doesn't negate all the other examples of how classical economic theory is destroying society and the planet.