By the time President Dwight Eisenhower completed his terms in office, and despite the attempted reforms by President John F. Kennedy, the most widely taught and practiced modern academic and business-practice traditions in the customary university teaching, and practice of forecasting of developments in economy, had become thoroughly, intrinsically incompetent. In my adult lifetime, all but a diminishing few of my possible intellectual rivals among the leading, and younger academic, business, and related long-range forecasters, in the Americas, or in western and central Europe, have always been wrong, and that more or less disastrously, in their outlook on the subject of so-called "business cycles."

This incompetence has principally three leading aspects.

Firstly, generally, in the U.S.A. and western and central Europe prior to and since 1971-72, the tendency which has been carried, more and more, to lunatic extremes, has been to rely upon more radically monetarist assumptions, assumptions which assume that all success depends upon making the "financial community" happy over the span of the relatively short to medium term. The assumption is, that the secret of economics is to make "the suckers," such as typical Wall Street investors, happy. The critics of that sort of nonsense have become a rapidly diminishing few.

Contrary to prevalent delusions in circles of governments and academia, it is not the financial market, but the physical economy which is real: it is the rate of increase of the physical standard of living, per capita and per square kilometer, which determines the actual health, and stability of the economy over the medium to long term: as in the U.S.A. presently, contrary to the foolish President George W. Bush, Jr.: "How good is your pension, and your cost of actually available and good health-care, when the time comes to retire?" The proper question is: What is the rate of increase (or decrease) of the potential relative population-density, per capita, and per square kilometer, of each and all regions of the nation, over the course of a generation or more? On this account, the U.S. economy has been experiencing a physical net decline in output, per capita and per square kilometer, over the course of (approximately) 1968-2007 to date, especially since the awful bungle of the 2000, Gore-Lieberman Democrats' Presidential campaign.

The second principal consideration, is the difference between the methods for forecasting weather and forecasting human behavior.

If we put the role of human behavior to one side, forecasting physical trends in the planet, and our Solar System, can produce useful results, but not mechanically predetermined results. Forecasting can be made successful, to the degree our science has been successfully developed for that purpose. In attempting to forecast human mass behavior, we are confronted with an additional, completely different challenge. For forecasting developments within social processes as such, we must emphasize attention to a voluntary capability unique to the human individual, a factor which does not exist in either inanimate processes, or living processes other than mankind.

This distinction of human, from plant and animal behavior, has two aspects, one ordinary, the other critical. There is the factor of somewhat animal-like, ordinary choice; but, there is also the crucial factor, which does not exist among lower forms of life, the power to change our societies' characteristic powers as a species, through the individual, original human thinker's discovery, or re-discovery of universal physical principles, as principles are typified for modern science by Johannes Kepler's uniquely original discovery of universal gravitation.[7] These discoveries of principle have an effect comparable to what might be considered as akin, in effect, to mankind's virtually willful evolution into a higher species, through fundamental and related scientific progress of the type which was forbidden by both the Olympian Zeus of Aeschylus' Prometheus Bound, and the present-day, neo-Malthusian dupes of London's "68er" and swindler Al Gore.

Thirdly, what I am stressing here, is the following point. To achieve a competent form of insight into these two factors which I have just listed, we must take a third qualitative consideration into account. No actual form of physical, or mental process can be competently represented by the kinds of Euclidean, Cartesian, or neo-Cartesian methods of the mechanistic-statistical forecasting used by the more typical modern economists. Real economic processes are not mechanistic-statistical, not empiricist processes, but are dynamic. Unfortunately, in the Americas or Europe today, virtually no leading politician, and very few among those trained in the subject of economics, have any competent conception of what the term "dynamic" means for the qualified scientist.

This use of the term dynamic is to be traced by any competent economist, or physical scientist otherwise, from the remarkable quadrivium of the Pythagorean science of Sphaerics, from which all a priori presumptions, such as the later Sophistry of Euclid, were banned; the relevant original term for the method of valid science, was dynamis.

The most famous example of the relevant application of Sphaerics was the proof of the construction of the doubling of a cube by the friend and collaborator of Plato, the Pythagorean Archytas of Tarentum. The revival of the use of the concept of dynamis, under the name of dynamics, was introduced, by name, to modern science by Gottfried Leibniz, in Leibniz's 1692-95 exposure of the fraudulent, mechanistic-statistical character of the same method of Descartes from which the degenerated practice of quacks such as John von Neumann,[8] and forecasters such as LTCM's Myron Scholes was derived.

However, the modern revival of the Platonic form of Sphaerics was actually begun, first, prior to Leibniz's work, by Cardinal Nicholas of Cusa's De Docta Ignorantia; but it was Leibniz who made the crucial connection to the concept of dynamis. Cusa's method was that, combined with Cusa's follower Leonardo da Vinci, from which we have proximate origins of the entirety of the work of Johannes Kepler, the first fully competent modern mathematical physicist after Leonardo da Vinci, and, as Albert Einstein has emphasized, the principal figure on which all competent science since, has depended.[9]

Therefore, all competent practice of economics today, depends upon a Riemannian insight into the principles of physical economy, as opposed to intrinsically usurious, monetarist schemes. This notion of physical economy includes a recognition of the inherently fraudulent and immoral character of the form of practice of usury known as monetarism, and demands an absolute contempt for Cartesian, or neo-Cartesian, statistical modes of so-called "economic forecasting."