"refining and focusing on what works and what doesn't." Sharing a commentary as taken from The one-handed economist.
Some economists have called our discipline the "queen of the social sciences." Although all the social sciences offer insights on human behavior, it seems that economics gets the most public attention and "market share" in terms of influencing public policy and discourse.
Let's say that economics has a 50 percent market share, with the other half being divided among anthropology, sociology, psychology, et al., in terms of where people go for inspiration and ideas that can help them understand social trends and individual choices.
Now some people would say that this 50 percent market share* is the result of some sort of rigged game or the rich getting richer** I think it's interesting to think of that share of "academic insight" as roughly proportional to the amount of human behavior it explains: around half.
Thus, we say that people in market settings behave in their own self interest (cf., Adam Smith's butcher and baker) rather than as sociologists might predict. On the other hand, economics has limited success in explaining populism or social media dynamics or any of a number of "irrational" (as far as economists are concerned) human behaviours. That said, it's not totally deficient when it comes to baseline predictions of how we might interact with strangers (game theory), friends (repeated cooperation; gift exchange) and family (the costs and benefits of children; lifetime income hypothesis).
The upshot of all this is that it's useful to understand economic concepts, to see where they offer useful predictive power but also to see where they fail.
But WHICH economics should you learn? There are many schools of thought and many theories, and I'd argue that the "market share" of any given economics idea within teaching (not research) is roughly proportional to its value. Ideas such as:
Some of you might note that I do not list many ideas from macroeconomics, econometrics, or the many varieties of "heterodox" economics. I don't for the following reasons, respectively: "we've predicted 9 of the past 5 recessions," "forget your data, I have theory," and "that's just regular economics applied to a special interest group."
I'm being a bit aggressive here so feel free to comment or argue. My main point is that the mix of economics "we" teach is somehow the result of many decades of refining and focusing on what works and what doesn't.
I am well aware -- and very critical -- of economic teachings that assume perfect information, ignore culture, rely on "home economicus," and so on. In those cases, I just say that's "bad economics," since simple counter-factuals invalidate those ideas, but people who say ALL neo-classical economics is bad are throwing the baby out with the bath water. Indeed, Alfred Marshall wrote down most of the economics we use today... in 1890.