Economics as it can be and ought to be

What would Economics be like without the grossly false, yet somehow widely accepted, belief in the automatic and universal rationality of economic actors? MIT finance professor Andrew W. Lo, and Harvard economic historian Niall Ferguson, are making progress in that direction. The title above this blog post is a link to a Niall Ferguson lecture about the complicated relationships between the application of genetic algorithms - "evolution" - in biology and in economics. Ferguson induces his concepts from the facts of reality that he studies as a business historian. Finally, an economist with an epistemology that an Objectivist can applaud. Having once read Ayn Rand's marginalia comments about how lousy the epistemology of Ludwig von Mises had been, economics was the last place where I'd have expected scientific work - with a sound, inductive, contextual epistemology - to emerge.