Seeing to It that the Subject of the Science Is the Subject of Its Practice: Toward a Theory of the Outcome of an Economic System’s Working

The history of economics has long been marked by active controversy respecting what the scientific subject is. The primary subject of the practice is what it ever has been: that immense physical reality whose observed state is subject to being aberrant; and those oft-cited mechanisms that are said to be working well or else not. A certain technical competence is required for even identifying and comprehending what they actually are in fact. And the science of economics has somehow come to be not altogether and foursquarely on the track-to the extent that, apart from certain offerings in Centers of Population Studies and Departments of Regional Science, the basic subject of the practice is virtually missing from the subjects treated in the science.