“Smith writes, ‘If the teacher happens to be a man of sense, it must be an unpleasant thing to him to be conscious, while he is lecturing his students, that he is either speaking or reading nonsense, or what is very little better than nonsense.’ All who have taught macroeconomics at any time during the past forty years will know this feeling well; for macroeconomic theory has been riddled with Kuhnian anomalies since its inception ... we who teach any kind of ‘pure’ theory ought to be as embarrassed with microeconomics as with macroeconomics ... what we presently possess by way of so-called pure economic theory is objectively indistinguishable from what the physicist Richard Feynman, in an unflattering sketch of nonsense ‘science’, called ‘cargo cult science’.”

-- Robert Clower, “Economics as an Inductive Science”, Presidential Address, Southern Economic Association, 1993, in the Southern Econ. J., 1994, pp. 805-814.

“... I regard the claim that economics is a science as not only premature and not very honest but also, perhaps worse, pretentious. What is striking is that so far economics has provided no evidence that it is. For instance, it is hard to think of any economic propositions that all reasonable economists regard as either conclusively falsified or verified by the world. There are vast and quite fundamental gaps in both theory and empirical knowledge. The basic assumptions of much of our theory are often of low descriptive merit, and our success in prediction has not been such that we can adopt the cavalier attitude to assumptions that Friedman advocates. And so on.”

-- Frank Hahn, “Autobiographical Notes with Reflections”, 1992.

“[Neoclassical economists’] appeal however to the need to reconcile the relatively smooth functioning of behavior and of share imputation in observed economic systems” is an appeal, not to Wonderland, but to the Real World. Can’t they see that it is possible for a market economy to be “competitive” without satisfying the neo-classical equations? Can’t they imagine a world in which marginal productivities are not equal to factor prices, and are not in any definite relationship to factor prices - a world, for example, in which, with the approach of labour scarcity, the share of wages is falling, not rising, despite the fact that the marginal productivity of labour is constant or rising and Capital (in the relevant sense) is redundant in relation to Labour? Unless they make a more imaginative effort to reconcile their theoretical framework with the known facts of experience, their economic theory is bound to remain a barren exercise.”

-- Nicholas Kaldor (1966)

“We note that some of the leading thinkers of this school, like Arrow in America and Hahn in Britain, are well aware of the weaknesses of their model and of their own precarious situation. Among their followers, however, this insight has not as yet gained much ground. In Chicago, it seems, one lives as within a citadel and refuses to take notice of it at all. Just as with the decline of a culture we often find that its values are still maintained for many decades by the faithful masses when the cultural avant-garde has long turned its back on them, we find the heirs of the late classical way of thought today in a similar situation.”

-- Ludwig M. Lachman

“Contemporary economics appears superficially to be a discipline that is in perfectly good health, spawning numerous journals, graduating thousands of economics majors in universities, and scores of Ph.Ds. But a closer look suggests that it is working itself into a major crisis of relevance...Modernistic notions that used to be powerful weapons economists could use to proclaim their superiority over other social sciences now make the whole field susceptible to easy attack...Most economists are blissfully unaware of the fact that the modernist ground upon which their profession has been standing has been shifting out from under them. The earthquake has proceeded now to the point where some economists are starting to realize that their whole approach is at risk of being rejected by the academic world at large. If economics is still the ‘queen’ it may only be in the sense in which, in a post-modernist age, one may find a remnant of royalty that is subject more to ridicule than respect.”

-- Don Lavoie

“Page after page of professional economic journals are filled with mathematical formulas leading the reader from sets of more or less plausible but entirely arbitrary assumptions to precisely stated but irrelevant conclusions ... econometricians fit algebraic functions of all possible shapes to essentially the same sets of data without being able to advance, in any perceptible way, a systematic understanding of the structure and operations of a real economic system.”

-- Wassily Leontief

“Back when I was 20 I could perceive the great progress that was being made in econometric methods. Even without foreseeing the onset of the computer age, with its cheapening of calculations, I expected that the new econometrics would enable us to narrow down the uncertainties of our economic theories. We would be able to test and reject false theories. We would be able to infer new good theories. My confession is that this expectation has not worked out. From several thousands of monthly and quarterly time series, which cover the last few decades or even centuries, it has turned out not to be possible to arrive at a close approximation to indisputable truth. I never ignore econometric studies, but I have learned from sad experience to take them with large grains of salt... But it seems objectively the case that there does not accumulate a convergent body of econometric findings, convergent on a testable truth.”

--Paul A. Samuelson, “My Life Philosophy: Policy Credos and Working Ways” in _Collected Scientific Papers_, Vol. V, 1986.

“The success of mathematical physics led the social scientist to be jealous of its power without quite understanding the intellectual attitudes that had contributed to this power. The use of mathematical formulae had accompanied the development of the natural sciences and become the mode in the social sciences. Just as primitive peoples adopt the Western modes of denationalized clothing and of parliamentarism out of a vague feeling that these magic rites and vestments will at once put them abreast of modern culture and technique, so the economists have developed the habit of dressing up their rather imprecise ideas in the language of the infinitesimal calculus.”

-- Norbert Wiener