To spell it out - the major cause of spending power erosion for working people is corporate and financial action.

In reality, there is no other cause. Between increased costs due to speculation, oligopolistic profiteering, and overbilling for government services, with a bit of corruption to grease the wheels, wage demands and government welfare spending are pretty much irrelevant. (And when was the last time you heard of someone making a wage demand?)

The 'by definition' part is the fact that even on those rare occasions when corporate and financial action is quietly - very quietly - allowed to have created inflation, the only acceptable remedies are further downward pressure on wages, and cuts to government spending.

Price - i.e. profit - controls are utterly unacceptable.

In economic propaganda-land, there is no causal link whatsoever between increased prices created by asset/commodity profiteering+speculation, and official unicorn fart inflation, which is the number that gets bandied around on the news as a target.

Only worker demands and public spending can create inflation. No other economic agent is ever responsible.

If it starts to look like some other agent might be responsible, you can - and should - change the technical calculation used to define the inflation figures, and all is right with the world again. (E.g. I understand that by using vintage definitions of inflation, the real rate in most Western countries is very much higher than the 2% or so we're told it is.)

Of course all of this is insane double-think, and a naked lie. Even so - it's a very popular and persistent lie.

I don't doubt some economists have a more sophisticated understanding. But if they do they won't get a lot of air time, and they'll have even less opportunity to set policy.

Economics as in "study of the production mecanisms in society" are not political per se.

I'd argue it is, because of the way the question is framed.

What does 'productive' actually mean? Who defines it? In what contexts?

is about designing a productive process that optimizes resources: natural and human (as in work and capital).

Both 'work' and 'capital' are purely political concepts. They have no meaning in cultures that don't assume capitalist notions of growth and development.

Now, you could certainly start from scratch and begin by asking what kind of human activity is useful, what resources are available at what cost, and with what potential innovation multipliers.

You can then maybe create accounting systems with an explicit aim of encouraging stable, non-destructive long-term investment over short-term spivery.

But all economic systems are primarily value systems. And all value systems are political, in the sense they privilege some individuals and organisations, and handicap others.

The challenge isn't to be 'productive', but to make sure the political morality is as sane and stable as possible, and that public debate is based on accurate facts and not on deliberate lies, spin, PR, misdirection, theology, dogma, or other intellectual poisons.

Only then can you start creating an accounting system that measures the right things for the right reasons. And then you may - perhaps - finally be able to do some useful economics.

But if you don't do it in that order, whatever you create won't be politically stable.

My biggest criticism of economic theory isn't just that it's wrong or misleading, but that it ignores the nature of political feedback loops.

The feedback loops create inevitable, entirely predictable, explosive instabilities. So you not only get the economic meltdowns on a clock-like cycle, you also get the same tendency to repeated political and social catastrophe.

If there's a solution, it's going to come from reframing policy in completely new terms. Tinkering around the edges won't fix the underlying issue, which is that power tends to concentrate, and unchecked concentrations of power inevitably become self-serving and toxic.