[wpietri]

Excellent point. But I think it's not just dogma that drives this.

There's also tendency toward convenient over-simplification that's common among we nerds. It's a valuable tool; classical mechanics is a lot easier to learn and reason about if you ignore things like air resistance. One of the most important skills for a software developer is willfully ignoring 99% of the complexity to extract the 1% it's worth teaching the computer about.

But it's also dangerous. The simplifying assumptions of economics are things like perfect information, perfect rationality, unlimited mental processing power, unyielding will, and entirely unbiased cognition. That's useful in theory, but misleading in practice. Misleading twice over, because that's how people would like to see themselves. "I don't need regulation! I'm too smart to ever be fooled!"