Diane Coyle — Being modest about economics

“Economics is a wide enough subject already without having to include the whole of philosophy, psychology, sociology and human biology in addition. Let economists get on with their work, and let students of other social sciences get on with theirs.”
— Colin Clark, The Conditions of Economic Progress, 1940

This doesn't imply that economists should ignore knowledge developed by other fields that is not only relevant but essential. Economists "intuitively" arrive at unrealistic assumptions largely because they apparently don't take knowledge developed in other fields into account in their own work.

Human agency is central to economics but economics does not study human agency. That is the subject of philosophy (ethics and social & political philosophy) from the normative POV and cognitive science including psychology, the life sciences and the social sciences including economic anthropology and economic sociology. 

It can be argued that macroeconomics is a subset of political science as much as economics since it is policy oriented and in many ways ideologically based. The major approaches to macroeconomics are based on methodological assumptions that are in many cases more ideological than scientific, that is, more normative than descriptive.

A huge problem with modern knowledge is the disciplinary approach that tends to compartmentalize knowledge and research. The knowledge fields are hardly devoted to pure knowledge unadulterated by the human condition in that each field has its own culture, institutional arrangements and therefore sociology and politics. There is not only knowledge but also sociology of knowledge, including a sociology of economics. 

Anthropologists and sociologists would look at the different economic schools in this light, asking why the various schools arose in the historical conditions they have an what influences were operative in the formulation of assumptions that distinguish the schools from each other. Randall Collins has published a magisterial work on this in philosophy, The Sociology of Philosophies.

Randall Collins traces the movement of philosophical thought in ancient Greece, China, Japan, India, the medieval Islamic and Jewish world, medieval Christendom, and modern Europe. What emerges from this history is a social theory of intellectual change, one that avoids both the reduction of ideas to the influences of society at large and the purely contingent local construction of meanings. Instead, Collins focuses on the social locations where sophisticated ideas are formed: the patterns of intellectual networks and their inner divisions and conflicts. [publisher's summary] 

The idea that economics is a positive science discovering natural law is an ideological assumption that arose at a particular time, namely, the rise of classical physics. There is little in the practice of economics suggesting that this is so, but the ideological assumptions persist in an environment that exalts natural science on the tree of knowledge. Are economists that adopt such assumptions wannabes?

The Enlightened Economist
Being modest about economics

Diane Coyle | freelance economist and a former advisor to the UK Treasury. She is a member of the UK Competition Commission and is acting Chairman of the BBC Trust, the governing body of the British Broadcasting Corporation