Money Wisdom #224

"...economics has always been the social science that could make the most plausible claim that what it was doing was anything like a natural science; it has long had the additional advantage of being seen as the very model of 'hard' science' by the sort of people who distribute grants (people who themselves usually have some economic training). It also has the advantage of joining an extremely simple model of human nature with extremely complicated mathematical formulae that non-specialists can rarely understand, much less criticize."

David Graeber Toward an Anthropological Theory of Value - The False Coin of Our Own Dreams (2001) p.6