Interesting observations. That would be quite the fraud if rank-and-file economists don't even believe their models are approximations of economic truths. I suspect the fraud works somewhat differently, but there's still a fraud going on here.

Frauds are much more common than we might think because they're found wherever there's self-deception too. Even if the 99 percent somehow defeated the top one percent and got to implement a social democratic agenda, I'm pretty sure the 99 percent would perpetrate a fraud on themselves. They'd start to believe certain dubious myths because it's exceedingly hard to believe only the truth or what's rationally permissable, and to be free from bias and delusion. When we deceive ourselves, we, too, not just the power elites, live in a lie.

I'm just saying there's an existential problem here, not merely a tribal one.