A coruscating rant about an ideologically-driven economics which is missing the point of the scientific method. I’m not sure how much straw man tilting is going on here, but the point about the importance of small deviations is one that is well worth getting ones head around
What Lucas means when he asserts that deviations are ‘too small to matter’ is that attempts to construct general models of deviations from the efficient market hypothesis – by specifying mechanical trading rules or by writing equations to identify bubbles in asset prices – have not met with much success. But this is to miss the point: the expert billiard player plays a nearly perfect game, but it is the imperfections of play between experts that determine the result. There is a – trivial – sense in which the deviations from efficient markets are too small to matter – and a more important sense in which these deviations are the principal thing that matters.
John Kay – The Map is Not the Territory: An Essay on the State of Economics.