Good question. I've had folks tell me it all boils down to economics, which is a sad way to view the world, but our current value system seems to be all about the Benjamins. There's too little concern for the stuff that truly makes a body happy.
Anyway, economics is an academic discipline that would like to believe it's a science. Unfortunately, economics fails utterly in its predictive accuracy (unlike real science) and doesn't do so well in the explanatory sense, either. So economics falls within the social sciences, which are often called soft sciences because they are widely open to interpretation, unlike hard sciences (mostly physical sciences).
Economic models have been proposed that purport to govern financial activity (Smith, Hayek, George, Keynes, Gailbraith, Friedman, etc.), and they either do or don't fit well with reality. But because the underlying data is difficult to discover and easy to manipulate, most explanations are hugely unreliable. For instance, FDR's New Deal is alternately interpreted as having saved capitalism or as having started socialism in the U.S. The two economic systems are in conflict, and the paradox is that FDR may have done both, since we have a blended system with parts taken from diverse models. Considering how politicized the issue of economics has become, it's not easy to find professional economists or politicians with a balanced view, as there is usually an agenda to be promoted.
This answer was edited by Brvtvs 86 days ago.
Reason: clarification
