Paul Turpin quoted Stephen Toulmin as saying: ?"When social scientists took Newtonian Dynamics as the example of a Serious Science, they hoped to win three prizes at the same time: developing (a) an abstract theory with a rigorously valid axiom system, (b) deductions of the nature of human institutions from its universal principles, and (c) scientific explanations of the character of particular social institutions. Yet this triple prize was never a realistic possibility; it had never been achieved even in planetary astronomy."
 Hmmmm...
The social scientists may not have figured out how to win the prize, because they probably did not grasp the point of (serious) science. And what is the point of science? Bertrand Russell says (.. the point of philosophy is to start with something so simple as not to seem worth stating and to end with something so paradoxical that no one will believe it.?
So what is the thing so simple as not to seem worth stating? It is the obvious fact that in every instance of trade, the buyer pays the seller. And what happens if one recognizes this seriously, so that one spells out its implications? One ends up with a unified economics in which micro and macro, trade and money and development and demography are all one and the same, inseparable and indistinguishable and compact and coherent.  No one will (as yet) believe that the inescapable implication of the starting premise: ?each buyer pays his/her seller? is that the entire corpus of economic theory can be reduced to a single equation v(x) =v(y) where the buyer delivers x in payment of the good y such that the value v(x) of the x he pays is exactly equal to the value v(y) of y he buys. 
 
This equation v(x) =v(y) is the ?abstract theory with the rigorously valid axiom system?. There are four possible scenarios of payment (including the case of null payment or non-trade) that are expressed as four variations of the same equation to cover subsistence (no trade), barter (direct trade), money (indirect trade) and bond or credit (inter-temporal trade). If we combine them, we inevitably integrate the buyer and seller in the same analytical frame, and fuse the matters of trade and money and development just by looking at the manner of paying.
To deduce the character of human institutions, it is enough to compare the natural prerogative of plunder versus the social institution that prohibits plunder and imposes a payment obligation on the would-be plunderer who is compelled to become a buyer and payer. Nature does not give the deer any right to sell its body to the tiger: it is made to be preyed upon freely by the hunter. Only humans have abrogated the law of nature to enact a right of the owner of something to insist on getting a compensatory payment from the would-be plunderer now converted into buyer. 
And if an individual producer is allowed to ask for a payment and is ensured that he does get a payment, the unnatural act of trade begins and the unnatural agency of the intermediary appears. A merchant is one who creates a market by buying what he does not consume, and by selling what he does not produce. Trade makes people dependent on their customers and suppliers; and the pattern of payments determines the character of this dependence. Economics is essentially a study of the economy in which trade based dependency relations generate events that never occur in ecology. Ecology is where production and consumption take place without any trade and payment, namely where the tiger kills and eats the deer without ever paying. An economy is where one produces what one does not consume but sells and where one consumes what one does not produce but buys (except for a negligible fraction of output). Insert buying and selling in between production and consumption, and a whole chain of entirely unnatural phenomena begins to occur.
 If an economist were to see the obvious that the buyer must pay the seller, he would be compelled to see the social institution that compels him to pay. Since an institution abrogates natural law and abolishes mechanism as the immutable source of (natural) law, and since enterprising humans are able to change the manner in which they interact with others, Newton is no longer the Grand Peer of the social scientist. I will not say who the Grand Peer is.
 
And yet manmade institutional law really assures a high degree of certainty or regularity of conduct to provide what must be called rigor:  Just look at v(x) = v(y) to see the rigor.
 
But as Russell predicted: no one will believe it. For example, v(x) = v(y) is the essential statement of the theory of price (and the theory of almost everything else in economics).  If x pays for y, then the price of y is given by the ratio (x/y) The price of y is the quantity of x (per unit of y), and the equality of demand and supply of y cannot give the quantity of x. But who will believe it?

Mohammad Gani