" the economists have come to believe their own fictions. It is very strange stuff altogether. They build the models based on the a priori assumptions that they hold. Seemingly they then forget these assumptions. Then when they need an answer they consult the model which spits back at them what they already built into it. This output is then assumed to be Truth because it comes imbued with a sort of aura. In more practical, real-world sciences this has a name: its called GIGO which stands for Garbage-In, Garbage-Out. In more primitive societies this is similar to constructing altars to supposed oracles and then going to these altars to find out about the future, only to find a Truth that you yourself have already built into the altar. "
One of the factors in city-making that we explore in Cities By Citizens is the tension between democracy (rule by the people) and technocracy (rule by experts.) Planners are the obvious experts who shape the city, but so too do economists.
Neo-classical economics (all about markets) has come under sustained criticism recently, for its bias towards certain interests in societies. So too have the arbitrary assumptions that economists have made in their theories, many of which are being shown to be just plain wrong.
This article takes a well-deserved poke at the pretensions of economics, in the tradition of Horace Miner's "Body Ritual among the Nacerima": https://www.msu.edu/~jdowell/miner.html