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... is a term occasionally used by those sceptical of economics to emphasise, well, the dismal state of the subject, though the original meaning of the phrase is different.
At any rate, we do live in a world with vast areas of undiscovered irrationality, and the dismal science marks out not a small part of that mystic territory.
Having gone through a handful of the most frequently used textbooks of economics at the undergraduate level today, I can only conclude that the models that are presented in these modern mainstream textbooks try to describe and analyze complex and heterogeneous real economies with a single rational-expectations-robot-imitation-representative-agent.
That is, with something that has absolutely nothing to do with reality. ...
For almost forty years mainstream economics itself has lived with a theorem that shows the impossibility of extending the microanalysis of consumer behaviour to the macro level (unless making patently and admittedly insane assumptions). Still after all these years pretending in their textbooks that this theorem does not exist — none of the textbooks I investigated even mention the existence of the Sonnenschein-Mantel-Debreu theorem — is really outrageous.
The source.
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