ABSTRACT
The strangeness of the science of economics and its practitioners, to be clear, is not necessarily economists’ doing. Rather, the expectations with which people (like yourself?) approach economics and its practitioners are strange. To put it more bluntly, economics is not strange, but you who accuse it of being strange are strange in that you cannot (or will not) reconcile the image of the real economic scientist – bickering, gossiping, exuberant, obscure, and, yes, even interesting – with your own. But as any psychologist will tell you, people view the discipline through a personal framework of interests, concepts, and images. Most preconceived notions of what a science should be are not what people see in the science of economics. Most preconceived notions of what economists should be doing are not what they see in its practice. But these ideas come from them, from you perhaps, not from the scientific discipline itself.
