ANOTHER BOOK ON THE IGNORANCE OF ECONOMISTS

Philip Mirowski has written two books that take a critical approach to modern economics (here and here) and one of his main points is that economics has been badly distorted by what Zachary Karabell calls "physics envy":

Why economists should try to measure happiness
Zachary Karabell's new book, The Leading Indicators, shows the problem of relying too heavily on traditional economic measurements
By Sean McElwee | April 4, 2014
THE WEEK

The varied economists who developed national indicators (Fisher, Mitchell, Burns, Kuznets), Karabell explains, suffered from "physics envy." But economics is not physics. Indicators, rather than representing some objective view of reality, are injected with controversial assumptions.

Karabell writes, "The leading indicators are the products of a particular phase of Western history." In this phase, economics was seen as a mechanism, rather than a human endeavor subject to what Keynes called the "animal spirits."