[woodandsteel]

I agree. I think a lot of the problems with the economics profession today are due to the fact that when it was originally got established, it never properly worked out its basic assumptions. One major problem area here is thinking out the relation of economic science to the other social sciences.

In spite of such major deficiencies, economic science was very lucky and promoted the free market, which was in many ways an amazing success. As a consequence economists got the mistaken idea their science was basically sound, and never set about thinking out its basic assumptions.