It just might be thet COVID-19 if forcing the social changes that are necessary for cutting greenhouse gases (which would curtail production and travel). We are seeing, such as with the satellite pictures of north central china and tuscany before and after much of the shutdown of production and travel, that we can make significant differences. How people will adjust to curtailment of consumer culture just might hold fom this criis into the Climate crises. Also the education of the people as to how globalization and economy work might be a graduate degree in holistic analysis.
___________
Joseph A. Schumpeter defined ‘history of economic analysis’ as ‘the history of the intellectual efforts that men have made in order to understand economic phenomena or which comes to the same thing, the history of the analytic or scientific aspects of economic thought’
From Maifreda, Germano – From Oikonomia to Political Economy: constructing economic knowledge from the Renaissance to the Scientific Revolution.
So history of economics is history of thinking about the economy, not a history of the economy, , which remains largely unwritten. This is consistent with the tendency in economics to focus rather smugly on the beauty of formalism rather than on the comprehension of llves.
___________
We brag about how few work in agriculture, freeing up people for less necessary production. But agriculture does not widely distribute income to people who might buy things, if they had the income. The shift of the economy from mostly necessities to mostly discretionary breaks the logic of the economic mode, now exacerbated by the replacement of the labor for discretionary items with automation. This makes the population superfluous for production and tghe people need a new rationale for existing.