In science the way one manipulates numbers in a model doesn't change the nature of the universe itself.
Look a physics. Relativity still existed before Einstein came along to describe it. We were not living in a Newtonian universe before that.
The earth has never been "the center of the universe" whatever humans happened to believe at the time.
No matter the mathematical models we create to describe our universe, the universe is not going to change to accommodate them.
Economic theory isn't like that.
Congress could pass a law to change the speed of light, or set pi=3, but the universe doesn't care. If we try to live by the laws of Congress and ignore the laws of nature, then nature will kill us. We can't legislate "zero gravity zones" and do away with elevators in buildings, or wings on airplanes. Step into an elevator shaft without an elevator, fall, and die. The wings come off your airplane, fall, die. Your pi=3 engines explode? Die.
To an outsider observing our current economic system it is clear that only a small percentage of economic activity is actually "productive," in the sense of making this world a richer place, not just for humans, but for the overall cultural and biological diversity of life itself, and not just human culture and biology either. Wolves have a culture. Whales have a culture. Condors have a culture.
But most of the things economists call "productive" are actually exploitive. There is "profit" to be made by destroying the natural environment and increasing the overall misery of cultural populations such as ourselves.
There's nothing "productive" about that exploitive sort of profit.
There's so many ways religions can fuck us up. How many gay people have our religions discarded? Alan Turing? Far, far, beyond that, and into the depths of hellish sorts of despair .
How many rich cultures and environments have our religions destroyed?
What do we know? Somewhere in North America maybe there was a plant that cured some common form of cancer. The indigenous people knew about it, knew how to use it. Then the Europeans invaded, killed off the indigenous people and their culture, and slash-and-burn destroyed the forest where the rare plant grew.
We are much poorer today for that.
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