Piketty went as far as saying that the reason he moved back to France from the US is that in Europe, economics is treated as a social science like anthropology or sociology while in the US it's treated as a hard science, like chemistry or physics. And that is the crux of the issue: economics is a theoretical framework prone to ideology and dogma that reflects our best thinking on complex, interconnected financial systems. It is not a field that lends itself well to theoretical derivation, nor is it subject to experimental repeatability. Yet articles such as this take the "back off, man, I'm a scientist" approach to things where no science has been applied. Ayn Rand was a science fiction writer, yet the chairman of the Federal Reserve subjected our economy to her musings for 19 years. If the Surgeon General tried the same thing with L. Ron Hubbard's ideas on psychiatry the entire world would call him or her batshit insane.