The Crisis of Our Time and the End of the New "History"

The issues raised on the congruency of the Nobel prizes awarded, the will of its founder, and the economic process are only part of a much more complex and deeper problem that constitutes the true genesis of the crisis of our time: an anthropological and not economic crisis. The debate on economics and its methods of study cannot be separated from a correct reading of history that in the long term tends to repeat itself, as G.B. Vico had envisioned; the nature of man never changes, constantly oscillating between Cain and Abel, and it would seem that only pain leads man to wisdom. The single technical-rational thought makes us see the future as the only guarantee of success and we therefore cannot understand the correlations between the causes and effects in our history. We act as if the past had been erased and as if history had never manifested similar situations to those in which we find ourselves today. The debates on the role of studies in economics, and in particular finance, are broader and must be ascribed to a historical framework to understand how these have contributed to an acceleration in the change of a socio-cultural model that has collapsed but has its distant roots in the field of speculation. The change is rooted as far back as Kant, who with the utterance of self-doubt affirmed that reason rendered the finitude and absolute character (infinity) of freedom a starting point of German idealism and the historical materialism of Marx. The West entered the "tekhné" world and began to separate man from his soul, thereby establishing as "truth" only that which is tangible, observable, and measurable, and the sciences that explain this truth become themselves "truth". This principle of truth has also been extended to economics, to its methods of study, and the role that we attribute it in defining the priorities of the founding values of society. The prizes, as previously noted, have helped change and legitimize the methods of study of a science that was born and remains an instrumental and social science but has ended up assuming the role of a moral science, namely teleological, to be studied as a positive and exact science. We have ended up exchanging the ends for the means, where man no longer defines the needs but the external system becomes dominant, independent of the man who becomes the means, an “economified” man. In short, we do not earn to live but live to earn and thereby life as a means can itself become a commodity. In the positive and exact sciences, however, the object of study is independent of the person who studies it - a reaction takes place because it responds to its intrinsic rationality - but in economics, the object of study - the search for the best combination of needs and scarce resources - is also an integral part of the emotional dimension of the individual addressing the problem.