So much work you're putting into such a strawman argument. Why bother? And shouldn't you be working on your Ph.D., or something? Why are you spending so much time arguing with me?

I never made what you called the second claim. I said that economists ignore or whitewash various factors, not that doing so renders their models nonfunctional. Obviously, economists set the rules and methodologies and devise models that work within those confines. It's not a question of whether economic models work, given the economist's standards. It's a question of the full truth of capitalism, and whether economists produce pro-capitalist propaganda more than science.

And I haven't been presupposing any narrow conception of happiness. "Happiness" is roughly just the goodness of a type of life, such as one in which the person's desires tend to be satisfied. Economists want to ignore the normative aspect of economics to make their discipline seem scientific. So they replaced "happiness" with "utility." That kind of jargon would be fine if economics were potentially a hard science like physics. Alas, societies aren't physical objects. So neoclassical economics was bogus and suspicious from the get-go.

Again, I do my arguing in my articles, not so much in these comments.