Economic science or economics is about individual and collective decision-making, primarily in the material domain. It is an integral part of the use of food, water, energy and minerals, as previous chapters show. There is the micro-level of individual choice, with notions such as value and utility. There is the macro-level of organization: coordination from above (state, church) and coordination from below (market, community). Material quality of life is interwoven with political and economic power and, unsurprisingly, economic organization is a reflection of power distribution in society, and so is its intellectual representation in ’economic science’ (ideology). The organizational and ideological forms have a tendency to be corrupted and become part of historical cycles. The dominant form in Modernity is market- and technology-driven economic growth in (corporate and/or state) capitalism. It is hailed for its successes in material quality of life, but it also did and does create side-effects which become ever more visible and harmful (environmental and social ’externalities’). The prevailing economic ideology is therefore in disarray and there is a broad search for complementary and alternative views on a sustainable and fair organization of the economic system (degrowth, post-growth and others). It is naturally the domain of -- perhaps the fiercest -- worldview battles.

The chapter discusses Pasinetti’s arguments for a theory which is ‘firmly placed on an objective foundational framework’ rather than on the fictional reality of the ‘purely imaginary world of rationally behaving individuals’. This approach – Pasinetti argues – was typical of the ‘Cambridge Keynesians’, which following a path traced by Marshall, placed at centre of the analysis not abstract entities, but flesh-and-blood economic agents acting in various specific markets. The vision of economic behaviour guided by customs and habits, setting limits to the crude maximisation through marginal analysis, was shared by Kahn and Keynes, who accepted it in its modified form, namely, not as exact calculation but as the outcome of a trial and error method. Although they did not endorse Sraffa’s rejection of its validity for price determination and income distribution, they shared the common objective of placing reality at the centre of their analysis, rather than abstract rationality, as the principle guiding behaviour. In other words, what characterises the approach is a vision of individuals less stereotyped than mere maximising machines. This means that in the Cambridge approach there is room for rationality in depicting political and economic decisions, as long as we interpret it as constrained by limited knowledge and uncertainty.