Economics - the Mongrel discipline

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I mean mongrel, of course, in the sense that it is a hybrid. The classical British economists whose ideas form the basis of modern capitalism were interested in economics as an aspect of the whole of social life. Its interconnections with other aspects of that life were as important as its own inner principles. But starting with Ricardo, economics began to turn itself into a discrete discipline, and chose to model itself on the positivistic sciences, physics and mathematics. Humans and their subjectivity are too hard to pigeonhole, so mathematrical models which could be manipulated at will became the holy grail of theoretical economists. “The concentration on money and the market rather than on physical goods, with the concomitant decision to model itself on the methods (but not the content!) of physics, has been characteristic of the whole of modern economics. This paved the way for the primacy of deduction and the focus on mathematical models and computer simulations that are the hallmark of current practice in the discipline. Such elaborate and beautiful logical structures heighten the tendency to prize theory over fact and to reinterpret fact to fit theory.” (Herman E. Daly & John B. Cobb “For the Common Good: Redirecting the Economy toward Community, the Environment, and a Sustainable Future” p38 Boston: Beacon Press, 1994) To "prize theory over fact and to reinterpret fact to fit theory". And so Nobel Prize winner (Economics) Becker can say in 1976, marriage is "an arrangement to secure the mutual benefit of exchange between two agents of different endowments", and others have pointed out that on a cost benefit analysis, it is possible to show that the benefits of global warming (e.g., a dramatic reduction in the use of fossil fuels for heating, the better growing conditions for food crops) may outweigh the costs (building seawalls, relocating threatened populations etc.). Thus, it would be possible to justify deliberately speeding up global warming to reach these benefits sooner. Such approaches, of course, totally ignore the human aspects of the equation. Do you find these examples of the inhumanity of economics as chilling as I do?Lash