Imagine I told you that a child born in Lahore's Defence Housing Authority neighborhood has higher chances of becoming a neuroscientist, a successful finance analyst, or even an entrepreneur than an average child born in Chauburji at exactly the same time. Now imagine that I asked you to place a bet on the future success of the two children. Whose future would you bet on?

If you said you would bet on the child born in Defence, congratulations! You have a chance of becoming an excellent entrepreneur. If you can justify this using mathematical jugglery based on unrealistic assumptions and dogmatic assertions about human behavior, you are a trained economist.

In the previous century, the Nazis used the theory of eugenics to stop the poor from reproducing. Eventually they justified just killing the sick ones. We have come a long way since then as a creed. We now have a more sophisticated, empirically rigorous, scientific, and above all else "rational" reasons to be a fascist. Neoclassical economics is the eugenics of our times. It is the scientific justification of why the poor, the minorities and the downtrodden must be satisfied with lower wages, unequal standards of living, and exploitation. It has established selfishness as the basis of human existence. It has convinced a class of young, bright and intelligent human beings that the purpose and aim of human socioeconomic intercourse is to make the most out of the curse of limited resources, by any means necessary. Snatch, steal, rob, and exploit: but maximize your own, individual selfish gain and you are the eternal, the omnipotent and the all-encompassing "rational" agent.

Neoclassical economics claims that it is based firmly in human nature. Moreover, it also lays claim to having taken the crown in empiricist reasoning. Walk into any neoclassical Economics department and the coolest rumor mongers would be patting each other on the back for the stupendous discovery of a positive coefficient on a regression between income and higher education. Academic papers soon translate into policy papers and policy papers are then used to justify the diversion of "scarce" resources towards higher education. This, for instance, explains why the Ministry of Finance in Pakistan - a country with 7.3 million children not going to primary school - proudly boasts that 74.5% of the total allocation made to the education sector is spent on "tertiary education affairs and services" while a nonexistent 9% is spent on primary education. The vision is clear: give more to the winners so they can consolidate their victory.

Why this line of reasoning is flawed is as impossible to explain to the neoclassical economist as it was to explain the pseudoscientific basis of Eugenics to the Nazi ideologue. The economist has been trained to believe in the scientific illusion of empiricism. He enthrones data - past relationships between entities or variables - on the citadel of impartiality by believing that the past can be used as the best predictor of the future. He fails to realize that the past was a product of the norms, laws, social forces and power balances that were peculiar to it. Human decisions, such as how much to produce, how much to invest, and how many kids to have, are pivotally influenced by the class, race and gender specificities of each environment. The past, the present and the future are not on the same continuum, rendering comparisons not as simple as many people in the religious creed of Economics would like to believe. Similarly, any grand narrative of human economic action that bases its analytical framework on the assumption that "human beings are selfish" exports time specific values on to the past. History is read backwards, so that it becomes easy to label hunter gatherers, communistic village farmers or indeed slaves, serfs, peasants and workers as irrational agents (notice the degree of dehumanization in the terminologies employed).

The neoclassically trained economist fails to see why human collective action is impossible in the wake of the possibility that private gains could be maximized simply by cheating. Thankfully, Eleanor Ostrom, the only female Nobel laureate in Economics (notice the degree of misogyny) has shown that common problems are best solved when solved collectively. In other words, the solution is not to privatize common resources but to harness the communities' ability and potential to govern their common production, distribution and exchange issues by themselves and for themselves. Production and distribution is done best when done by the workers collectively by themselves and for themselves.

Contemporary economic theory suffers from the problem that all empiricists since David Hume have had to face. If we have only seen white swans in the past, does that mean that there are no black swans and there never will be any in the future? The truth, however, is that human economic history - both in the technological and the social sense - cannot be understood without understanding that the future is always fashioned by negating the past. What lies beneath the rubric of new innovations, new discoveries, and improved methods of organizing production and distribution is not the isolated, selfish, self-centered man, but the socially conscious and historically specific ever-rebelling human who is always in the process of conditioning his social environment. The motor force of economic history itself is the unpredictable, ever brewing and never completely fashioned spurt of human creativity that responds to the past by striving to change the rules that governed it. New rules, norms and methods of organizing production, distribution and exchange - what Marx called the Mode of Production - are created so that past relationships can never be used to make policies in the present or predictions about the future. If all the solutions that you offer are based on a "see this is the way it always happened" reasoning, you are assuming that the past and the future are going to operate in a similar institutional environment.

This means that you have taken the current class, race and gender power hegemony in the economic system as a constraint on your policy intervention. The sphere of policy making is then easily restricted to a "within-the-system" approach to the problem. To feel better about this choice, this approach is also popularly known as the pragmatic, realistic and rational choice.

In most situations, however, the set of problems that a country faces are a product "of the system" and the systems internal rationality. If you do not like the outcome of a game you cannot change it merely by switching the players. You must change its rules. A change in the rules means changing the game itself. In the context of the economic system this means that class, racial and gender inequities are a product of the system and hence cannot be solved without changing the system itself. No amount of flirting with the interest rates, or changing investment and savings ratios will cure the curse of unemployment, inequality, illiteracy and malnourishment without demolishing the system that gives birth to these outcomes.

The system is rational but only for some people and in the real world the ruling, "rational", profit maximizing interest groups benefit from the status quo. If someone asks why, for instance, there are homes without people and people without homes, machines without workers and workers without jobs at the same time in a society, the problem cannot be reduced to the "irrationality" of humans. The irrationality of the outcome is a product of the "rationality" according to which the system operates. To change the world we must go beyond the rationality of the past which is nothing but the rationality of the rulers over the ruled.

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