In any case Brooks is worth a read. Here are a couple of excerpts:

Some brilliant scholar has to write a comprehensive history of modern economics because the evolution of this field is clearly one of the most consequential things happening in the world today.

Act I in this history would be set in the era of economic scientism: the period when economists based their work on a crude vision of human nature (the perfectly rational, utility-maximizing autonomous individual) and then built elaborate models based on that creature.

Act II would occur over the past few decades, as a few brave economists tried to move beyond this stick-figure view of humanity. Herbert Simon pointed out that people aren’t perfectly rational. Gary Becker analyzed behaviors that don’t seem to be the product of narrow self-interest, like having children and behaving altruistically. Amos Tversky and Daniel Kahneman pointed out that people seem to have common biases when they try to make objective decisions.

read more…

Three men went off on a sailboat together, a physicist, a chemist, and an economist. Unfortunately they ran into a storm and the boat was wrecked on an uninhabited island. The only food they were able to rescue from the wreckage was a case of baked beans. As they got hungry, they began to wrestle with the problem of how to open the bean cans. The physicist said “I’ll climb a tree and throw a can onto a rock and it’ll split open.” The others didn’t much like this idea because they thought the beans would just splatter everywhere. The chemist said “We can soak the cans in salt water and they’ll rust through.” The others didn’t much like this idea because it would take too long. Then the economist said “Hay–no problem, we’ll just assume a can opener.”