When I was in secondary school, we were taught a lesson on the geocentric model of the solar system. It felt like a waste of time then and it still feels like a waste of time; it would have been enough to explain that it didn’t work and that we’ve since moved on to better models.

But no, we had to draw the charts and calculate the orbits and do all sorts of tedious work, I guess so we’d learn just how much effort went into trying to save a broken model. Every fix and kludge they applied created new errors, which had to be fixed, which created new errors…

I think about that sometimes when I listen to capitalism’s proponents try to explain things like infinite growth on a finite planet or maximal economic freedom in a world of total private ownership. Just kludge after kludge forever.