This is news to me: Economics has obtained the mirror image of scientific truths...

Economics can provide powerful insights on market behavior. Indeed, economists from various ideological backgrounds have managed to reach a consensus on several major issues, and from that vantage point, we can say the field has developed something resembling scientific knowledge.

The writer, of course, sees one branch of economic thought, neoclassical, as the image for all that is economics, as economics looking at and admiring itself by itself. And when he says "economists from various ideological backgrounds," he must mean neo-Keynesians—men and women who adopted the neoliberal obsession with game theory and mathematical models (Dynamic Stochastic General Equilibrium, for example, with its incredibly fictional representative agent) to remain competitive with the mode of economic thinking that replaced Keynesianism after the Philips curve was "disproved" by stagflation in the 70s (I will not even get into how the "natural rate" was also "disproved" after Greenspan increased short-term interest rates in 1994 and forced banks to loan money to businesses—the birth of the Clinton-era debt-based prosperity). In short, the whole piece wonders why Seattle, a city with lots of educated people, would vote for some one who does not believe in economics.
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  • Kelly O

One of those insights is that people respond to incentives. If I offer a teenager $50 to mow my lawn — and an extra $25 if he trims the bushes — then I can expect to shell out $75. I just offered my little helper a handsome incentive, and there’s a very good chance he’ll respond to it. This insight on human behavior is so basic and obvious that it is listed as one of the foundations of economics in Harvard economist Greg Mankiw’s textbook Principles of Economics.
Insight on human behavior? He has no idea of the very short history of capitalism (an economic form that did not exist 300 years ago), no idea that the labor market was something that had to be imposed with state force on the population, that it did not spring out of the air or the mind of God. But to be aware of this is to take history into account, and doing such a thing would not be economics.