As for the Nautilus post itself, it is just an interview with someone who works in the field, not a rigorous scientific document, and they are free (surely?) to express their views about whatever they and the interviewer wish to discuss.
To your later points - I don't know what "understanding the private sector" or "understanding the economy" mean to you, but I would suggest that the person in question does have _some_ understanding of the economy (at least), inasmuch as they have contributed to a formalised understanding of the dynamics of the economy as we (humanity) currently understand them. I'm not entirely sure what else you want - perfect predictions or go home?
Frankly it just sounds like you disagreed with what they said, but, as I already mentioned, you are as entitled to your opinion (as they are to theirs).
It means the object of scorn does not share certain assumptions about the underlying purpose of economics. To be roughly as unfairly sweeping as the gp, you get that a lot from Chicago school types.
1. Do you believe that all economists are engaged in distributing propaganda, or just some?
2. To what end is the propaganda distributed (or maybe on whose behalf)?
3. Are other academic fields similarly concerned with distributing propaganda?
I'm saying that the narrative produced from the status quo in economics has been, for almost all of my life, very conducive to the interests of the powerful.
Do other fields have people doing that? Of course. The petroleum industry has been able to pay for people to push their agenda. That's a thing that happens.
There are some historical, political, and material reasons for the state of economics and academia in general.
Lots of academia is literally just job training for corporations, so don't front like it's above the fray. Even genuine, and valuable, research gets prioritized over less research that isn't as valuable in the private sector. So, again, I'm not the one saying that academia has a problem. Lot's of academics have said these things.
Also, from an argumentative perspective it always seems like economics starts from something like a thought experiment and then go on to use the results of that "experiment" as a evidence in its own right.
Yes, Einstein used thought experiments, but he used known physics as the starting point. I hear economic arguments that start with a premise that isn't a settled thing like "lets assume that we are hunter gatherers on the savanna and you have some beads and I have an arrowhead." It's not based on a measurement that other people have made and agree on. It's not even based on an archaeological dig where the bones of two people were found.
I realize that isn't what actually goes into a phd thesis. Its economics used as a force of nature that bothers me. It's inevitable. Maybe I'm just calling economics the pseudo-ish stuff that I get presented as a layman. Maybe every economics school in every university has a healthy group of people who are critical of basic assumptions. I hope so.
If you are an economist and I offended you, then please accept my apology. That wasn't my intention, really.
You see this from economists who fail out of physics close to 100% of the time. They don't really understand anything about the private sector, they understand even less about the economy (they just want to do things that they enjoy rather than produce things for others), and they often have these very strong feelings about capitalism...without really having any evidence for these views (or any awareness of the trade-offs...again, this is the kind of thing you don't learn in physics/math class).