In the Mises Daily Article today, Robert Higgs takes on Paul Samuelson (“the greatest living economist)” and mainstream, mathematical economics.  It’s a devastating blow and well worth reading.   

A sample:

Nothing has done more to render modern economic theory a sterile and irrelevant exercise in autoeroticism than its practitioners’ obsession with mathematical, general-equilibrium models. Not only does this focus result in the futile spinning of mental wheels by mathematical pseudoeconomists, but it has pernicious consequences for policy formulation because, as James M. Buchanan has observed, it gives rise to “the most sophisticated fallacy in economic theory, the notion that because certain relationships hold in equilibrium [in the model] the forced interferences designed to implement these relationships [in the real world] will, in fact, be desirable” (What Should Economists Do? [1979], p. 83).