We're no competition for ideology when it's disguised as science

No other social science suffers more from "physics envy" than economics. That's one reason it has become such a highly mathematical discipline. The great physicist Max Planck said in the early years of the last century that it would take him less than a week to master all the maths he needed to learn economics. Today, a prominent physicist has said it would take him a couple of months.

Why should we, the non-economists and non-physicists, care? Surely it's good for a discipline that has so much relevance to our daily life to be as scientific - and hence as mathematically rigorous - as possible?

In a recent book, Lee Smolin, a leading theoretical physicist, offers a trenchant criticism of this way of thinking. He argues that at a fundamental level, physics not only doesn't get something right about the physical world, its own blind spot has contaminated the highly mathematical framework of neo-liberal economics that has been the dominant school in most post-war economics departments at Western universities.

Smolin isn't the first to make this argument, but he does so in a unique way by resting his criticism on deep philosophical ground: the nature of time.

Time Reborn is really a book on physics. His argument is that seen from the way in which Einstein's theory of relativity and contemporary string theory - sometimes called the theory of everything - abstract away time as a real physical entity, they are not radical breaks from Newton's classical mechanics but its heirs. We need to embrace time, he argues as a physical reality, and that means reinterpreting its fundamental equations. All this is highly abstract. But towards the end of the book, Somlin comes down from Mount Olympus.

"Probably the greatest harm done by the metaphysical view that reality is timeless is through its influence on economics," he wrote.