Tweet [1]
… is from page xxi of the second edition (1998) of Deirdre McCloskey’s path-breaking 1985 volume, The Rhetoric of Economics [2]:
Economics, like geology or evolutionary biology or history itself, is an historical rather than a predictive science. Economics is not widely regarded as an imposing creation of the human mind. But I think it is. It is social self-understanding … as remarkable as anthropology or history. All the more pity that economists have in the past fifty years become idiot savants of modernism.
“Modernism,” as McCloskey uses the term here, is quite like the “scientism” criticized so profoundly by Hayek [3].