By any reasonable criteria, the discipline of economics as a whole, in its present state, is sadly lacking. - Paul Ormerod

Baseball players or cricketers do not need to be able to solve explicitly the non-linear differential equations which govern the flight of the ball. They just catch it.

The importance to Smith of the overall set of values in which the economy operates is generally ignored by his followers in the late twentieth century. His economics, based upon individual self-interest, is remembered, but his moral framework is not.

The behavior of the economy as a whole, at the aggregate, macro-level, is built up from the individual equations at the micro-level.