Guess it's not all me ...

David Brooks' column in today's NY Times is the best statement I've seen to date of what is going on in the world(s) of economics.

Some brilliant scholar has to write a comprehensive history of modern economics because the evolution of this field is clearly one of the most consequential things happening in the world today.

Unfortunately, what Mr. Brooks apparently finds too troublesome to delve into (or he just hasn't gotten around to it yet) are some of the political and policy implications of what he's discussing, especially as they apply to the US Republican party. Not to say that the Democrats didn't follow the same drunken piper, oops, sorry, naked emperor. ;)

The timing of the Acts I, II, etc., that Brooks refers to in his piece conveniently excuse this problem -- the emperor never really had any clothes on, and more than one child (or author) was pointing this out for well over 50 years. He does include a nice bit from a professor at George Mason:

In The Wall Street Journal, Russ Roberts of George Mason University wondered why economics is even considered a science. Real sciences make progress. But in economics, old thinkers cycle in and out of fashion. In real sciences, evidence solves problems. Roberts asked his colleagues if they could think of any econometric study so well done that it had definitively settled a dispute. Nobody could think of one.
“The bottom line is that we should expect less of economists,” Roberts wrote.

But note his heartfelt, I'm sure, assertion in this paragraph:

Economics achieved coherence as a science by amputating most of human nature. Now economists are starting with those parts of emotional life that they can count and model (the activities that make them economists). But once they’re in this terrain, they’ll surely find that the processes that make up the inner life are not amenable to the methodologies of social science. The moral and social yearnings of fully realized human beings are not reducible to universal laws and cannot be studied like physics.

Got news for you, David -- for the moment, I think you're correct -- but it looks like a race. What understanding we have of the ways in which people live and react is not evenly distributed amongst the population. And if you don't think marketing is as much of a science as economics has claimed to be, you're fooling yourself. If it is the case that what humans need and want can be understood well enough, then those who understand (and have resources) have no real constraints on manipulating the majority who don't understand. Guess you could count on market discipline -- not that there's any sign of it anywhere in this regard. Oh, wait, there's ethics and morality, right? To date, fairly slender reeds ... but maybe all we've got.