But that’s a strawman. I didn’t say sciences have to be experimental. I said that when the firewall of experimentation is absent, “as in the case of recent theoretical physics, the science tends to become a theological cult as Lee Smolin and the others argue.” So I posited a tendency or a ceteris paribus regularity. That regularity might be disrupted in various ways without experimentation.

Perhaps pure sciences are indeed rare. As Feyerabend said, there’s no real scientific method in practice. But there are degrees of approximation to the scientific ideal here, and one of the factors that separates them is the extent to which scientists are tempted to depart from scientific principles. Some areas of inquiry are just less interesting to the rest of society than are others.

Economics is part of the business of making money, so that’s pretty important to people. Therefore, economists have faced enormous pressure to tell the most appealing narratives, to celebrate a certain plutocratic style of wealth-creation.