I'm curious about what you think economics could be based on (especially since its clear you don't subscribe to wild eyed optimism regarding near future post scarcity economics)?
Not seeing the "labour theory of value" style reasoning from non-Marxist economists; if anything I'd have thought the criticism was the opposite (purely market based measures of purely extrinsic value, with any structural change that further decouples purchasing power from people or work assumed to be relatively unimportant, macro that assumes unemployment is a signal for the priority of inflation targeting, not underused capacity to create value, micro-view of capitalists substituting capital for labour and labourers substituting labour for leisure according to their relative (expected) prices looks very different from Victorian assumptions about iron laws of wages etc). Modern economists haven't abandoned the idea of labour productivity as influencing output (and nor should they) but they've conceived vastly greater roles for credit, "human capital", roles of monetary or fiscal policy, corrective taxation and redistribution and even basic labour-drives-change models incorporate ideas like efficiency wages and search costs.
There are a couple of interviews with me floating around talking discussing some of the mechanics of a post-scarcity economy. I'm excited for it, but am doubtful I will see it in my lifetime. I mean, I was eager for it in the 1980s when I was actually supposedly working on it(!) but I don't feel we're really even on the path yet. As Gary Marcus has quipped: "you don't get to the moon by building more ladders."
On the economics side, tracking of things like the unemployment or labor force participation rate; NAIRU, and all that Keynesian blah blah are stuck in a model and measurement system that is as utterly divorced from how the practical level of the economy works as GDP. It's not like everybody doesn't know this (except cough at the policy level and among the general public).
Yet monetary policy and much of academic macro appears to me fixated on the most abstract and abstruse, and I wonder if that is a kind of uber-bikeshedding, where you focus on what you can reason about, like string theory or high dimension manifolds. I understand that impetus -- it's why I gave up on CS research and decided to work on practical things. But the foundations of the practical side of macro, as I said, seem to have given up on the concrete regions of the economy (I know I am being quite unfair here to economists like, for an arbitrary example, Autor). The famous abstract homo economicus, non-existent as he ever was, has almost faded away. Let us not forget that those new and exotic credit instruments, at the end of the day, need to lead to benefit of some sort for the person on the street. The existence of some new instrument is not sufficient justification for its existence. Yet that's where a lot of attention goes, probably because finance is no longer considered a service industry like gardening, doctoring, or lawyering, but a calling to service...of itself.
To me the economics that is exciting right now is the empirical micro work that spread from MIT over the last few decades and finally even got a Nobel. But little to none of that seems to address the issues of a post-scarcity world, apart from a few isolated and heavily constrained UBI trials.
And that's what I liked (and all I liked) about MMT: at least it reimagined the whole structure of macro, and caused me to think. But the "worker" is still not really visible, any more than old homo economicus. Oh yeah, and what about "citizen"?
Not seeing the "labour theory of value" style reasoning from non-Marxist economists; if anything I'd have thought the criticism was the opposite (purely market based measures of purely extrinsic value, with any structural change that further decouples purchasing power from people or work assumed to be relatively unimportant, macro that assumes unemployment is a signal for the priority of inflation targeting, not underused capacity to create value, micro-view of capitalists substituting capital for labour and labourers substituting labour for leisure according to their relative (expected) prices looks very different from Victorian assumptions about iron laws of wages etc). Modern economists haven't abandoned the idea of labour productivity as influencing output (and nor should they) but they've conceived vastly greater roles for credit, "human capital", roles of monetary or fiscal policy, corrective taxation and redistribution and even basic labour-drives-change models incorporate ideas like efficiency wages and search costs.