The Undercover Economist Strikes Back - Tim Harford

Abstract

Economics has been termed by a commentator as a "messy discipline, too fluid to be a science, too rigorous to be an art". But while political science, sociology, history and other disciplines share with economics the attribute of being "two parts wonder drug and one part snake oil", economics occupies a niche of its own "by virtue of its technical wizardry and appearance of certitude....... having provided since at least the end of World War II the language with which we discuss public policy and shaped the topology of our collective mental make-up", [Dani Rodrick].