Responsibility of economics and economists

# 3061

√I am reading Rifkin’s new book. It raises the question: how guilty are economics and economists for the sad state of the world? He writes

unprepared to address nonequilibrium thermodynamics in which every expropriation of available energy provides a short-term gain, but at the expense of a greater long-term entropic loss, including the energy embedded in the product itself. The efforts by economists to factor in a few easily recognizable positive and negative externalities that might accrue in the life cycle of a product are a pitiful attempt to come to grips with the reality that every economic exchange has a long entropic tail that spreads in every possible direction, affecting other phenomena.”

Excerpt From The Age of Resilience by Jeremy Rifkin

Economists seem to have failed to raise warning signs as problems emerged. They hung in with their benefactors instead. What can we do about it now that we are in a  serious death spiral?