When I was studying Microeconomics and Macroeconomics at university as part of my business degree I was always puzzled by the approach that this so called science took. It would use models that were based on unrealistic assumptions about a single product in a single market and then extrapolate the results to apply across the vast complexities of the real world. They would constantly speak of “the perfect market” in which no single buyer or seller could influence the market, there was no cost of entry to the market and all buyers and sellers had the same level of knowledge. They said the closest you got to this state was the stock market, by even a rudimentary glance slows that none of these conditions apply.
Clearly any science that bases its theories on such fantasies is bound to be a very flakey and non-scientific science. But it these theories on which our governments make decisions that influence the lives of millions of people every day.
In Debunking Economics, Steven Keen meticulously takes each of the modern dominating schools of economic thought and picks them apart exposing the gaping holes in the theories and the irrational adherence to easily disprovable concepts such as market equilibrium which prevade their beliefs.
It is not an easy book to read, as Keen makes clear at the start and in fact there are whole sections which he suggests can be skipped unless you are a glutton for punishment (I am).
A prior knowledge of the subject helped me through and for someone fresh to economics, the eye might glaze over quickly. This is unfortunate, because the average person in the street will probably take at face value the utterances made by expert economists on TV sound graps and believe what they say when their “expert” advice is based on a very flimsy foundation.
In this sense economics is very much like a religion. It adherents have rarely read the original texts or questioned their contents and simply follow the belief of their fellow economists.
If you can get through the slog of finishing this book it is well worth while. It is high time that the people running the world look for an alternative to neo-classical economics as an explanation for how the world works as its foundations are about as solid as a belief in virgin births and people rising from the dead. But then again , it explains why so many followers of conservative neo-classical economic are also devout Christians.

Dunking Ecomincs can be purchased on-line via http://www.debunkingeconomics.com/.