To consider the economy as being "beyond good and evil", and therefore not based on ethics, is a common phenomenon. They strive to make it as "scientific" as possible in the sense of ultimate utilitarian rationality (dating back to the times of Smith and Bentham), while even others, being strictly consistent in this, reduce economics exclusively to econometrics on all economic issues, supplementing the principle of utilitarian rationality, from which, of course, economics came out in its theoretical-equilibrium originality (as a consulting practice for surviving in the chaos of competing economic agents) with the inspired by Whitehead principle, according to which there is as much science in any science as there is mathematics in it (and not the history of its own subject, which only makes any science sober in the sense of self-reflection).
This chaos, which has not gone anywhere in the 300 years of the existence of political economy with its main problem, the "central question" and ways to answer it, nor in the 150 years of the "cotton wave of demand", during which all three options for answering this question turned out to be more or less clearly articulated (accurate to the moment when this wave of demand passed into a phase of active recession).
It has even become fashionable among enlightened economists who refuse to wear rose-colored glasses to flaunt not only this statement about "the economy beyond good and evil", but also that "life is pain", because adulthood is economic life, and the only instance capable of limiting the (terrifying and almost Planckian) chaos of economic agents playing "king of the monopoly mountain" is the state, which manifests its existence through violent suppression, tax robbery and fiat money. This is recognized as the norm of inevitable evil and a sign of economic professionalism, since political economy itself, declared or not, is thought to be the basis of all knowledge about human society.
In the same sense, declared or not, expert explanations of the current "Ukrainian campaign" (and all other previous "campaigns" too) are given in the sense that, de facto, since the state (AKA "tribal leader") is the first one who creates system of division of labor, and since the system of division of labor needs a "labor force" determined by the ratio of its mass to the density of its deployment in the sense of a sufficient size to launch "economic processes" (according to the latest decisions of Russian unfortunate managers, these should be agglomerations as a means of combating with single-industry towns), insofar as the territories that were previously part of the USSR must be returned to restart the "great project"... or not exist as territories equipped with infrastructure and population, so as not to overtake the economically weakening neighbor, leading many centuries of civilizational disputes with the rest of the world, against the backdrop of which even the events of the 20th century look like a special case.
These considerations are "beyond good and evil", and even in the form of an unarticulated underlying reason for decisions being made, they represent a rationalization of the latter, which at any moment can be partially or completely opened when everything goes "too far" (which, however, today This is exactly what happens on the part of "top management"). The point is not even that the impossibility of re-entering the river of "catching up development path" is not taken into account with deep resource (and slightly less deep and secondary - investment) integration into the world economy, all communications with which were cut off at once, leaving the country with bare ass and fig leaf illusions of purchasing power parity ("tasty, period!"). The primary problem (and this is in many respects the problem of the world as a whole, for the world is integrity) is that, having no alternative administrative initiatives (for there is a flight into the archaic in fear of imagination and creativity), the matter is again left to chance of the old and by no means not a good pre-capitalist demographic cycle.
And after a period of chaos of non-economic conflicts in the loci of pumping out global social entropy, life restarts according to the principles and models of more developed and organized forms. It should immediately be noted that vertically integrated forms are not more developed and organized: no matter how many levels a herd has, it will still remain a herd. And attempts to build an economy on the basis of complex hierarchies, guided by the idea of "hierarchical instinct", is a reduction that excludes economic reality even in this original, rational-utilitarian sense. For this reality is problematic precisely in the sense of its hierarchical manageability: this is the reality of the "unity of dissimilar", and not of "a set of similar", the only dissimilarity of which is the different levels in terms of the degree of idleness, which is resolved from time to time, as history testifies, by armed conflicts with similar hierarchies ...or with something that is "not so hierarchical". Isn't the problem with the modern world, with its eerie return to demographic cyclicality, that economic management is still not completely separated from the state at the level of public institutions and practices on a global scale? Maybe 300 years of existence of a social development model and consulting practice is not such a long time?
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Ethics penetrates the economy through the theory of externalities and the episteme of Gödel's theorem looming behind it (hardly recognized even by most of those familiar with the topic of externalities) as an intuition of the subject limits of the world order, given and conceivable in a concrete way in a concrete historical period. But this topic is "too strong magic" for those who are accustomed to think of economic phenomena in a common cloud of intuitions and definitions. Another presence of ethics in the economy is through the realization of the "open secret" that lies in a prominent place, that the logic of economic relations is based on the categories of debt and trust (credo / credit) and the modalities of this logic that follow from here as deontic, with the corresponding rules (albeit often implicit, inarticulate and fuzzy), associated with overcoming the inconsistency and incompleteness that are on the periphery of a consciously created and controlled economic process.
This awareness is the key point of disagreement on the central issue of economic science: either social conflict is immanent in this process, or it must be on its periphery. This is the same discrepancy between the dynamics of the process and the process of its description (and hence control), which P. Riker wrote about.
Since squeezing armed conflicts to the periphery of the world of economic competition smells of colonialism (and, of course, the resulting racism and Nazism), and the world, due to intensified trade in the 20th century and two world wars, "suddenly" became very small, the third answer to this question become the Keynesian idea of the "different modes" of being one and the same, closed on the material resources of the planet Earth, the world system, replaced by periods of economic ups and downs, accompanied, respectively, by conflicts of varying degrees of armament, aggressiveness, intensity and duration. (Which very well correlates with the idea of a “traffic light of threats” coming from the “second wave” (bio)cybernetics that arose in the “anxious 1970s” in the wake of an oil crisis so similar to the current 2020s.)
Stricter economic positions (for example, "neoconomics") assert the absence of economic growth as the norm, and its presence considering as an anomaly that occurs due to a fortunate combination of world-system circumstances (that is, the nature of which is far from completely clear, but can be indicated in some general terms). Political circumstances, as lying "on this side of good and evil," are not taken into account by "strict economists", with the caveat that the political is outside economic science (and the political is thought of by them, again, how exactly is it that the state, in its stationary gangster status, has democratic procedures exclusively as a Marxian "superstructure", therefore "serious scientists" do not pay attention to "screaming advertising").
One gets the impression that the human debate about the future of the world order at the deepest level is between Godel's "there is always more" and Boolean "enough fundamental". How to reconcile them? And are they truly irreconcilable? Isn't this a false statement of the problem? In the science of logic itself, there is no such problem: both methods of metadescription coexist in it as valuable ones. But there will always be something else than something one, for even a unit appears against the background of something equivalent to it.
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