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… is from page 109 of Robert Higgs’s insightful 2011 article “The Dangers of Samuelson’s Economic Method [2]” as this article is reprinted in Higgs’s 2015 volume, Taking a Stand [3]; (Higgs’s quotation of Buchanan is from the latter’s 1979 article “General Implications of Subjectivism in Economics,” which is reprinted in Volume 12 [4] of Buchanan’s Collected Works) (link added; brackets original to Higgs):
Nothing has done more to render modern economic theory a sterile and irrelevant exercise in autoeroticism than its practitioners’ obsession with mathematical, general-equilibrium models. Not only does this focus result in the futile spinning of mental wheels by mathematical pseudo-economists, but it has pernicious consequences for policy formulation because, as James M. Buchanan [5] has observed, it gives rise to “the most sophisticated fallacy in economic theory, the notion that because certain relationships hold in equilibrium [in the model] the forced interferences designed to implement these relationships [in the real world] will, in fact, be desirable.”
DBx: Precisely. Neither society in general, nor the economy in particular, is a machine to be engineered; instead, each is a process that emerges, along with each of their many and ever-changing specific features, as the result of human action but not of human design. Economists whom I regard as the greatest – economists such as (to name only a few) Adam Smith, Ludwig von Mises, F.A. Hayek, Ludwig Lachmann, Ronald Coase, Armen Alchian, Jim Buchanan, Leland Yeager, Israel Kirzner, Harold Demsetz, Julian Simon, Richard Wagner, Deirdre McCloskey, and Bob Higgs – focus their attention on understanding the processes of human interactions and how these interactions generate undesigned and unintended orders. These orders are never in a state of equilibrium, but they do feature extraordinarily complex interconnections and feedback loops that ‘knit’ together, into a society and an economy, all individuals whose actions contribute to the formation and maintenance of these orders.