Economics is Not a Natural Science by Douglas Rushkoff

Edge.org recently featured an interesting original essay by Rushkoff where he argues that economics is not a natural system and should not be treated as a natural science.

In short, these economic theories are selecting examples from nature to confirm the properties of a wholly designed marketplace: self-interested actors, inevitable equilibrium, a scarcity of resources, competition for survival. In doing so, they confirm — or at the very least, reinforce — the false idea that the laws of an artificially scarce fiscal scheme are a species' inheritance rather than a social construction enforced with gunpowder. At the very least, the language of science confers undeserved authority on these blindly accepted economic assumptions.