Wow, that article. After the gentle introduction I rarely made it a paragraph without having a major criticism.

He notes a bunch of legitimate but ultimately pretty minor criticisms of mainstream economics[1], has one actually solid argument[2] that he doesn't bring up until his conclusion. And uses that to advocate for throwing out all of mainstream neoclassical economics and all of mainstream macroeconomics, and do something totally crazy: replace it with thermodynamics[3].

He closes saying "But I’m also a hard-nosed scientist who dislikes analysis with dubious assumptions baked into it." He uses a bunch of minor criticisms and one core dissonance to argue for throwing out the current paradigm of economic science. Those "dubious assumptions" are the core of the current paradigm of economic science: that markets basically work most of the time. Believing that he's the smartest person in the field, he discards the established methodologies and replaces them with the mis-application of a more tractable field; he's doing what is sometimes referred to as quack science.

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[1]: Yeah maybe the framing around some analysis could be better (the bulk of his arguments). Yeah, it's problematic to use one price index for one part of a comparison, and a different price index for another.

[2]: Through the article, he shows that the chart is relying on believing that markets correctly value total economic output, but that markets are getting production workers' wages wrong. He doesn't call out this discrepancy until the conclusion though. IMO, it's the only argument he makes that really "debunks" the graph. However, there are lots of arguments that I can imagine economists making as to why the market gets things right or wrong in specific cases. However, he proceeds to argue that if you don't believe the market is valuing labor correctly, then why should you believe that it's valuing anything correctly. That you should totally abandon the idea of using markets to value things.

[3]: I kid you not. He writes:

> When you think this way, you realize that ‘useful work’ (the amount of energy put to an end use) is a good indicator of economic output. I propose that we treat useful work per labor as an alternative measure of labor productivity.

The author carefully words this so that it sounds reasonable. "'useful work', yeah, that sounds like a good way of defining 'productivity'." There are two big things wrong here:

1. How do we quantify "useful"? My first reaction was: OK, sure, but the measures that you're proposing to use this instead of are measures that let the market decide what's useful and how to value that. That's the type of thing that markets are supposedly pretty good at most of the time. If you want to argue that the market's getting it wrong in this case, that'd be one thing. But lets see how he proposes quantifying it, if not by markets...

2. ...oh, "useful" is just a fluff word, and he pulled a switch-a-roo with "work"! The casual reader might think that he's talking about something somehow connected to labor, but he's not! He's talking about physics-class thermodynamics "work".

My jaw dropped, I laughed out loud. He's seriously proposing that we stop measuring the productivity of labor by any human-level measure of value delivered, and instead measuring it by how much electricity and fuel is used! He even says this:

> ‘Useful work’ is based on the laws of thermodynamics. The standard measure of productivity, in contrast, is based on the dubious assumptions of neoclassical economics.

Yes, because thermodynamics is totally relevant here. But hey, it's a hard science™, so it's always better than drivel coming from the soft sciences, right?