My qualified endorsement of the Greens has led to some consternation: how can an economist endorse a party which has some fruitloop ideas? I suspect that some of this bemusement is a form of culture shock; it arises from the gulf between my perspective as an economist and that of Westminster bubblethink.

From my perspective, the main parties are just daft. They are promising to cut the deficit although this risks exacerbating any future slowdown and ignores the fact that negative real rates make this a great time to invest in infrastructure. They want to curb immigration even though there's no economic case for doing so and such curbs might hurt long-run growth. They are silent on the UK's single biggest economic problem, stagnant productivity and have no ideas about what to do about the banks beyond regarding them as a magic money tree; you'd never guess from the election debate that it was banks that caused the financial crisis. They have little solution to the housing crisis. And they seem to think governments can raise billions from reducing tax dodging without telling us which loopholes companies are using and which they intend to close.

In all these ways, the mainstream parties are as loopy as the Greens - and perhaps more expensively so given that macroeconomic errors can have a bigger cost than micro ones. As Martin Wolf says, none of them deserve to win.

Non-economists, however, don't seem to appreciate just how silly the mainstream is. A big reason for this, of course, is that the media has constructed its own narrative of mediamacro which legitimates deficit fetishism and "concerns" about immigration whilst marginalizing other issues such as the economic cost of inequality and stagnant productivity.

Mediamacro, however, is only part of the story. It is one of a number of practices whereby the ideas of those in power are given credence.

We see this, for example, in the way in which the media jealously guards its access to politicians to preserve the privileged dialogue of bubblethink - hence the hostility to Ed Miliband meeting Russell Brand. We see it in the way in which matters of choice are presented as necessities. We see it in the way in which some engagement with politics is approved and some (such as Milifandom) sneered at. And we see it in a host of legitimation rituals. These include the language of politics - who else uses phrases like "committed to", "pledge" or "the right thing to do"? - and even the dress code; Yanis Varoufakis is often called "unconventional" because he doesn't wear a tie.

Politics has many ways of creating and sustaining what Paul Krugman calls "Very Serious People" and Nassim Nicholas Taleb "empty suits" - men (generally men) whose judgments (always judgments) are sensible, sober, and wrong. One reason why I'll be voting Green is to reject this flummery.

Another thing: one might ask why there is no political party with entirely sound economics - one that: is concerned about productivity; anti-austerian; pro-market (in the right institutional framework); and egalitarian. But that's another question.