Economics - The Dismal Science

I've been thinking about my Dad today, how he served for five years in the Air Force despite being a pacifist. And then I read Patrick Deneen's great post on economics over at What I saw in America and heard echoes of my father speaking. Dad shared many of these criticisms of the discipline of economics and rarely went to meetings of economists. He thought it was a mistake to think economics was all about manipulating models as if it could be divorced from political life in the broadest sense. He would be one of those heterodox economists Deneen mentions.