Until his dying day in 1601, Tycho Brahe believed that the sun and all the other stars revolved around the earth. For him, our planet was the center of the universe. It wasn’t that he lacked the data to understand the error of his thinking; indeed, it was none other than Brahe’s own meticulous observations that Johannes Kepler later used to develop the view of the solar system that is so familiar to us today. The devil, it turned out, was not in the details, but in the assumptions.

The choice we confront today as we consider the global economic system is not so different from the one that Brahe faced almost four centuries ago. Like Brahe, we can decide to interpret facts on the assumption that the sun, the stars, and the planets orbit the earth, and invent elaborate explanations for the observations that don’t fit. Alternatively, we can adopt a more contemporary, but also quite threatening, view of the solar system.

Today, some of our most fundamental beliefs about the global economy need the same scrutiny that Kepler lent Brahe. We need, in Emerson’s words, "to pierce through rotten diction and fasten again words to visible things."...