Though economics as a discipline arose in Great Britain and France at the end of the eighteenth century, it has taken two centuries to reach the threshold of scientific rationality. This has finally brought economists to a broad, well-founded consensus about what constitutes good policy. So writes Guy Sorman in City Journal.

Almost all top economists - those who are recognized as such by their peers and who publish in the leading scientific journals - would endorse the following 10 propositions. The more the public understands and embraces these propositions, the more prosperous the world will become.

1. The market economy is the most efficient of all economic systems. Market mechanisms are so efficient that they can manage threats to long-term development, such as the exhaustion of natural resources, far better than states can.

2. Free trade helps economic development. Free trade not only generates the greatest possible growth; it tends to distribute it widely, both within nations and among them.

3. Good institutions help development. All economists acknowledge today that economic development requires an independent and reliable legal system to enforce contracts and ensure fair competition. Institutions that improve market transparency are particularly important.

4. The best measure of a good economy is its growth. Unlike other proposed measures (happiness, for example), economic growth can be determined objectively: it is the rate of increase in a country's gross domestic product (GDP) over a given period. There may be wide agreement that GDP omits important aspects of economic activity, but all economists agree on growth's importance.

5. Creative destruction is the engine of economic growth. The ceaseless replacement of the old with the new - driven by technical innovation and entrepreneurialism, itself encouraged by good economic policies - brings prosperity, though those displaced by the process, who find their jobs made redundant, can understandably object to it.

6. Monetary stability, too, is necessary for growth; inflation is always harmful. Inflation destroys entrepreneurship, slows growth, and generates social inequality. The best way to restrain inflation, economists now understand, is to transfer money management from governments to independent central banks like the Federal Reserve and the European Bank, which - monetarists all, these days - try to create only enough credit to provide liquidity and prevent the financial panic that often accompanies credit crunches.

7. Unemployment among unskilled workers is largely determined by how much labor costs. So regulating the labor market (with a minimum wage, for example) adds to labor costs, economists acknowledge, and increases unemployment.

8. While the welfare state is necessary in some form, it isn't always effective. Economists recognize that government assistance always produces incentives that may affect, for good or ill, recipients' behavior and well-being. The key is to avoid making individuals and groups dependent on state assistance, locking them into sustained semi-poverty.

9. The creation of complex financial markets has brought about economic progress. These sophisticated instruments, like derivatives, have facilitated risk-sharing on a global scale, boosting innovation and hence prosperity. The debate among economists today concerns only the degree of transparency and regulation necessary for their effective functioning.

10. Competition is usually desirable. Beyond that, there is no unanimity: some economists believe that under certain circumstances, a private or public monopoly may contribute to innovation or progress. What kind of protection to extend to intellectual property is also disputed.

These ten propositions should guide all economic policymaking, and to an increasing degree they do, worldwide, writes Sorman. The free market still has enemies and critics, ranging from those who dream of a world more just, more spiritual, or transformed in some other Utopian way And we must not overlook ignorance: economic principles aren't widely understood among the public or even among lawmakers.

In the future, an essential task of democratic governments and opinion makers - when confronting economic cycles and political pressure - will be to secure and protect the system that has served humanity so well, and not to change it for the worse on the pretext of its imperfection. This lesson is doubtless one of the hardest to translate into language that public opinion will accept, concludes the author. The best of all possible economic systems is indeed imperfect. Whatever the truths uncovered by economic science, the free market is finally only the reflection of human nature, itself hardly perfectible.

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