Quote on economics

Here's a quote concerning economics which I agree very much with(must be Banard's influence).

I have never been able to grasp how one can understand any ideas without knowing where it came from, how it evolved out of previous ideas. ... Great theories, in economics as in other subjects, are path dependent ... that is, it is not possible to explain their occurence without considering the corpus of received ideas which led to the development of that particular new theory; had the body of received ideas been different we would have arrived at a different theory at the culmination of that development. In other words, without the history of economics, economics theories just drop from the sky; you have to take them on faith. The moment you wish to judge a theory, you have to ask how they came to be produced in the first place and that is a question that can only be answered by the history of ideas. (Blaug, 1994c)

I especially agree with the part on "without the history of economics, economics theories just drop from the sky", which is in my opinion, sadly, the state of affairs of economics teaching and learning(and a lot of other subjects for that matter) in the Singaporean education system. Unlike perhaps the physical sciences, economics (and any other social science/humanities as well) cannot be treated as gospel(if only the world was that simple). The historical perspective definitely makes economics much more understandable than just pure theory. It would also aid in the understanding of the limitations of the various models and assumptions in economics(it appals me to see people advocating and applying economic concepts like free trade, taxes, subsidy blindly using textbook analysis smugly, thinking that they can't go wrong.)

What an incoherent rant.