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reminder: noah has never published an academic paper in economics and it looks unlikely that he ever will. he is simply not a competent guide to the field. this entire thread is a perfect example of the blind leading the blind: a journalist (noah) presents an entirely one sided view of the field, and intellectually lazy posters take it as a cue to dump on an entire academic field while freely admitting their ignorance of any of the details.

newsflash: most economists are acutely aware of the imperfections in their models. sure, you can find the blinkered and dogmatic, but that is unsurprising in such a large and varied field. the subject encompasses a serious variety of subjects and methods you (the hn poster) simply know nothing about. for example, machine learning techniques are really nothing new. theorists have been aware of the kahneman/tversky result for decades. please bear this in mind before you lazily declare the intellectual bankruptcy of the entire field.

p.s so-called econophysics was a direct attempt to apply models from hard science to economics and it has been a complete failure, since it lacks an underlying model of human behaviour. turns out this is quite important...