Economics, said Mr Stanley, is 50% psychology … What we need, apparently, is not statesman but hypnotists, not scientists, but witchdoctors, not confidence born of scientific prediction of the future, but confidence created by a political Confidence Trick. There is nothing surprising in this. It is the kind of mystic Mumbo-Jumbo to which capitalism is driven when austere reason pronounces sentence of death upon it. It is the primitive recoil from reality and the burdens of reality which lies at the root of Fascist psychology.

Modern economics is “sick”. Economics has increasingly become an intellectual game played for its own sake and not for its practical consequences. Economists have gradually converted the subject into a sort of social mathematics in which analytical rigor as understood in math departments is everything and empirical relevance (as understood in physics departments) is nothing. If a topic cannot be tackled by formal modelling, it is simply consigned to the intellectual underworld. To pick up a copy of American Economic Review or Economic Journal, not to mention Econometrica or Review of Economic Studies these days is to wonder whether one has landed on a strange planet in which tedium is the deliberate objective of professional publication. Economics was condemned a century ago as “the dismal science”, but the dismal science of yesterday was a lot less dismal than the soporific scholasticism of today.

Economics is not an exact science.

Economics has been called the dismal science. Once you get to understand it, you may not find it so dismal, but you don't find it much of a science either.

Economics is a fake discipline; attempts to improve it (s.a."behavioral","evo") made it worse! Finance moved to mathematics, accounting,etc.

The position I favor is that economics is a science, but a rather pathological one.

Economics is the most human of sciences. It is the science of wants and frustrations. It is psychology subject to the abstract, amplifying forces of mathematics.

[In] economics... you can disguise charlatanism under the weight of equations and nobody can catch you since there is no such thing as a controlled experiment. Now the spirit of such methods, called scientism by its detractors, continued into the discipline of finance as a few technicians thought their mathematical knowledge could lead them to understand markets. The practice of financial engineering came along with massive doses of pseudoscience. (page 115)

You will perceive that economy, scientifically speaking, is a very contracted science; it is in fact a sort of vague mathematics which calculates the causes and effects of man's industry, and shows how it may be best applied. There are a multitude of allied branches of knowledge connected with mans condition; the relation of these to political economy is analogous to the connexion of mechanics, astronomy, optics, sound, heat, and every other branch more or less of physical science, with pure mathematics.

[E]conomics can never be a science in the sense that physics or chemistry is. There are many different types of economic theory, each emphasizing different aspects of a complex reality, making different moral and political value judgments and drawing different conclusions. ...[E]conomic theories constantly fail to predict real-world developments... not least because human beings have... free will, unlike chemical molecules or [other] physical objects.

Economics is haunted by more fallacies than any other study known to man. This is no accident. The inherent difficulties of the subject would be great enough in any case, but they are multiplied a thousandfold by a factor that is insignificant in, say, physics, mathematics or medicine - the special pleading of selfish interests.

Economics is a social science, not a physical science.

ECONOMICS IS HAUNTED by more fallacies than any other study known to man. This is no accident. The inherent difficulties of the subject would be great enough in any case, but they are multiplied a thousandfold by a factor that is insignificant in, say, physics, mathematics or medicine — the special pleading of selfish interests.

Creative destruction can apply to economic concepts as well. And this downturn offers an excellent opportunity to get rid of one that has long outlived its usefulness: gross domestic product. G.D.P. is one measure of national income, of how much wealth Americans make, and it’s a deeply foolish indicator of how the economy is doing. It ought to join buggy.