heterodox is a common term in the economics world. imagine it says "mainstream" if you prefer.
> You could start by stating your assumptions and basic axioms.
I'm not here to write a text book on economics. I'm here to point out that "debt is bad, we can never carry on like this" is a belief, not a statement of fact.
Everything in macroeconomics is a belief, because it is clearly far from a hard science.
Common sense always applies to some degree when it is based on logic. Also my belief is that a system where there is no limits on government spending and debt seems obviously unstable and likely to become infinitely corrupt.
Common sense is a very poor guide to many aspects of the world. It's not true of physics, or biology, or astrophysics, and even areas of math are very, very far from common sense. Human cognitive biases make "common sense" as both a predictor how people will behave and as a basis for understanding the world a remarkably poor choice.
And yes, economics is far from a hard science and most macro is driven by some combination of personal experience and political ideology. But that doesn't mean that "non-common-sense" ideas about macro are wrong, anymore than it means that extrapolating from the "common sense" of personal experience (i.e. no limits on your own spending and debt will lead to bankruptcy) is right.
I said common sense "based on logic" specifically to sidestep this popular argument about the evils of common sense. Such common sense includes statements like "if something can't go on forever it won't". I guess you disagree with this statement?
But no I don't agree with your claim. Common sense is an excellent guide and a major reason why evolution gave us large brains. And that includes the hard sciences, only failing in very specialized niches that often took centuries to find after almost everything else was well-explained by intuitive theories. Biology is not a hard science.
Common sense is only an excellent guide if you want to predict specific kinds of things about the world. It breaks down once you leave the realm at which our senses operate (which includes national economies).
Morever, equating logic and common sense is to deny the recency of "logic". Humans reasoning like this, even if you want to take it back to the Sumerians, is a very recent development in human experience (probably).
> Biology is not a hard science.
OK. I wonder what all that lab time and experimentation was for that I saw when I was doing my PhD in computational molecular biology (never finished). I guess it was all just ... soft.
> centuries to find after almost everything else was well-explained by intuitive theories
No by "common sense based on logic" I mean common ground between both. To exclude gut feelings or emotion or whatever. And I'm sure logical thinking ability is also hardwired by evolution.
Realms where our senses do not operate would be microscopic or relativistic and the like where which we have never been able to observe before. National economies are completely observable and accessible to our logic and common sense. They are akin to thermodynamics which is not counterintuitive at all.
You are arguing by example and I am countering with larger classes of examples. For someone who gives up so quick on picking winners in macroeconomics theories you sure are sure of your answer here despite any quantitative basis for your claims.
> You could start by stating your assumptions and basic axioms.
I'm not here to write a text book on economics. I'm here to point out that "debt is bad, we can never carry on like this" is a belief, not a statement of fact.