Nothing is more damning than being told you are wrong by a scientific expert. Science has an insurmountable status. It is knowledge. It is truth. It towers above opinion, argument and, above all, ideology. Economics has that scientific status. But it also gets slammed as rampant ideology: a right-wing agenda to drain the world of human values. The casual observer gets caught between the two arguments. Criticisms of economics as a series of abstract models removed from the real world ring true. But so do the scientific credentials. Economists are clever people who have committed their lives to studying this stuff. They must know, right?

Most economic rationalists believe in economics' scientific credentials. They will protest that economics is not an ideology, that it is simply a tool. They will insist it is a value-free body of knowledge that can be used to deliver a wide range of goals. But such assertions reflect a poverty in economics teaching, and they run to the heart of why economic rationalism has been so hard to dislodge. The conviction that economics is a value-free science has been the buffer that has protected economic rationalism from its critics. It has enabled the central agency bureaucrats to cling to their decision-making checklists despite the rising tide of public discontent.

To tackle economic rationalists effectively, we have to recognise that economics is both science and an ideology. Economics is a valid scientific endeavour with noble aspirations. It is also deeply entrenched in ideology.