Economics reduces to simple concepts like Free Trade, Inflation and Unemployment which are colouring book caricatures of the economic forces that really shape people's lives.

If I grow bananas in South America, the concept of free trade vs protectionism is irrelevant when I can't get a fair price for my product because the supposedly level playing field is skewed - sometimes by force - to give the big corporates all of the leverage.

Anomalies like this mean that economics is wrong in so many ways that if you stripped it down to essentials and left the elements that have some connection with reality - meaning everyday reality, not the reality of the super-rich - there would be very little left.

Worst of all is the way that economics promotes an implicit moral code of mindless speculation and accumulation. Shared prosperity isn't a bad thing, but whatever the PR says, the real goal of economics today seems to be personal wealth accumulated with total disdain for the greater good, and the limited selection of social metrics that are used in economics - inflation, unemployment and GDP - are so crude that they exclude all social responsibility.

It's surely possible to create economic metrics that live in the real world, and not in some superficial 19th century abstraction of it. But for now these fake abstractions are treated as if they're the most important thing on the planet - which is literally an insane state of affairs.