Just as there is no gender without humans, there is no economics without people.
The best trick our would-be and de facto masters ever played on us is pretending that the “laws” of economics are embedded in the universe just like the value of the electron’s charge or the ineluctable consequences of the Chandrasekhar Limit.
In reality, economics is the sociology of various trading behaviors, mores and practices, not the physics of disconnected and passionless economic agents. If you study history and anthropology (which most economists obviously do not) you will already know that there have been over time societies that based their economies on all sorts of systems that are said to be “impossible” now in modern economic theory — from the moneyless yet rich society of the Incan empire to the potlatch cultures of the Pacific Northwest.
Historically speaking current economic practices and the orthodoxy surrounding it are the anomaly, not the rule.
That out of the way, it’s not that economics is in principle useless, merely as currently practiced. Much the same with evolutionary psychology.
But key to preserving the economic status quo is the vast majority of economists (and nearly all academic economists) presenting the current system as the only possible path, with laws as ironclad of those in particle physics that are embedded into the very fabric of the universe and thus unalterable by humans.
Viewing the world through classical economics is like looking through the world in a black and white pinhole camera, which is why I never much cared for it as a field of study.
A pinhole camera has nearly infinite depth of focus. It’s a far better instrument of observation than economic theory. And there’s no law against loading a pinhole camera with color film.
Infinite depth of focus, but not infinite field of depth. 🙂 What would be an appropriate metaphor for how narrowly and inaccurately focused classical economic theory tends to be? Nearly everything is explained as an “externality.”