"[1]The book seeks to show that much of the ideology in economics is due to microeconomics and attempts made by economists to try to understand the behaviour of individuals based on fixed and unchanging laws.

Pilkington argues that only macroeconomics, which deals with large aggregates of people, can allow for the abstraction necessary to generate scientific statements about the economics.

In order to ground economics in a proper epistemology and render it useful and clear he draws on the work of the philosophers George Berkeley and Immanuel Kant.

The book also argues that disciplines like economics can be subject to extreme biases that can have a highly negative effect on both theory and empirical studies.

Pilkington writes that the reason for this is that economic studies cannot provide repeatable controlled experiments and so they can reach extremely biased results.

In addition to these broad themes, a good deal of the book is concerned with laying out an alternative, "stripped-down" theory of the macroeconomy.

This relationship is mediated by historically contingent legal and economic institutions, like the central banks, which subordinate creditor power to the whims of governments, courts and technocrats.

In the Financial Times, journalist Martin Sandbu wrote that Pilkington "usefully revisits forgotten writers from the history of economic thought but insists a little too rashly that they alone were right and the entire direction the field took instead was misguided.

"[2] In the Irish Times Cillian Doyle wrote that Pilkington "dispenses with such appeals by making his pitch to the next generation, those who are currently cutting their teeth in undergraduate or postgraduate courses" and that he sees "economics as ripe for the kind of transformation experienced by religion half a millennia ago and with the same irreverence that Martin Luther once besieged the Church".

[3] In the journal American Affairs, economist Marc Morgan writes that the book "is a deeply informed, lucid, and concise critique of the edifice and history of the current dominant economics paradigm—what the author refers to as “marginalist economics”—coupled with a foundational reconstruction from first principles, “a firm grounding, a shrub that can, given time, grow into something far more robust.” It is a bold task, but one the author largely accomplishes with great precision, and more importantly, pedagogy.