Secret Sins of Academics
I highly recommend the article by economist Deirdre McCloskey entitled The Secret Sins of Economics, posted here (link near the end of the entry; the text itself is a PDF). Language Log notes:
...she has sections on "Virtues Misidentified as Sins" (these are quantification, mathematics and libertarian politics); on "Venial Sins, Easily Forgiven" (this is mainly economics' "obsessive, monomaniacal focus on a Prudent model of humanity", so that "[e]verything, simply everything, from marriage to murder is supposed by the modern economist to be explainable as a sort of Prudence"); and "Numerous Weighty Sins Requiring Special Grace to Forgive But Sins Not Peculiar to Economics" (these are Institutional Ignorance, Historical Ignorance, Cultural Behaviorism, Philosophical Naivete, "a high-school version of ethical philosophy", "arrogance in social engineering", "candid selfishness" and "personal arrogance").
On p. 37, she gets to the "The Two Real Sins, Almost Peculiar to Economics". In her view, these are proving qualitative theorems and testing statistical significance without a loss function.
The problem with these approaches being that the question of How Much, vital to engaging with the real world, is never actually addressed. Okay, you've found a statistically significant difference. Is it actually big enough to matter to people? That's a different question.
...she has sections on "Virtues Misidentified as Sins" (these are quantification, mathematics and libertarian politics); on "Venial Sins, Easily Forgiven" (this is mainly economics' "obsessive, monomaniacal focus on a Prudent model of humanity", so that "[e]verything, simply everything, from marriage to murder is supposed by the modern economist to be explainable as a sort of Prudence"); and "Numerous Weighty Sins Requiring Special Grace to Forgive But Sins Not Peculiar to Economics" (these are Institutional Ignorance, Historical Ignorance, Cultural Behaviorism, Philosophical Naivete, "a high-school version of ethical philosophy", "arrogance in social engineering", "candid selfishness" and "personal arrogance").
On p. 37, she gets to the "The Two Real Sins, Almost Peculiar to Economics". In her view, these are proving qualitative theorems and testing statistical significance without a loss function.
The problem with these approaches being that the question of How Much, vital to engaging with the real world, is never actually addressed. Okay, you've found a statistically significant difference. Is it actually big enough to matter to people? That's a different question.