Right.
NYTimes.com: Economists question dominance of free-market ideas (July 11, 2007)
"There is much too much ideology," said Alan Blinder, a professor at Princeton and a former vice chairman of the Federal Reserve Board. Economics, he added, is "often a triumph of theory over fact." ... And free trade is not the only sacred subject, Blinder and other like-minded economists say. Most efforts to intervene in the markets - like setting a minimum wage, instituting industrial policy or regulating prices - are viewed askance by mainstream economists, as are analyses that do not rely on mathematical modeling. That attitude, the critics argue, has seriously harmed the discipline, suppressing original, creative thinking and distorting policy debates.
...
And free trade is not the only sacred subject, Blinder and other like-minded economists say. Most efforts to intervene in the markets - like setting a minimum wage, instituting industrial policy or regulating prices - are viewed askance by mainstream economists, as are analyses that do not rely on mathematical modeling.
That attitude, the critics argue, has seriously harmed the discipline, suppressing original, creative thinking and distorting policy debates.
Perfect information? Rational maximizers? Give me a break.
They're modeling a system of ideal fluids, and then looking to see how well the actual fluids match up to the ideal, instead of making any attempt to model or understand the reality.
