Answer to why other social scientists dislike economists

Several reasons.

One is that outsiders often only see the worst of economics. An analogy: I'm nonreligious, and most of my friends are as well, and the ones who aren't are pretty quiet about it. So although I know intellectually that in many troubled neighborhoods it's only the religious who keep things together, that religion can provide the wisdom of past generations, and so on, the only time religion tends to come up in my life is when some asshole who thinks that a few years of Sunday school qualifies him to instruct others on the mysteries of the universe tells me that I'm going to hell.

Similarly, if you're a social scientist, economics most often comes up when some asshole is telling you that the majestic complexity of human society--something you've studied your whole life and have only scratched the surface of--can be described with calculus.

Social scientists are likely to get especially prickly about this because they understand how social science works. It's not--or shouldn't be--about starting with axiomatic "principles" and logically and mathematically deriving truths from them. That rigorously leads you into error. Like all science, it is (or should be) fundamentally about seeing what happens in the real world, and never letting your theories stray too far from that. And in fact, other social sciences have gone through a period of trying to be Newtonian physics, a period that the economist Thomas Piketty called their "childhood"--heck, I'll just quote him:

The discipline of economics has yet to get over its childish passion for mathematics and for purely theoretical and often highly ideological speculation, at the expense of historical research and collaboration with the other social sciences.

Economists would answer that the above is a distorted view of economics, and they'd be right. But to some degree it's a fair view as well. That is, as someone said (in an article in the Journal of Economic History that I'm not near right now), it's as legitimate to judge a field based on its textbooks as it is to judge it based on its journals. And by that measure economics really does have a lot to answer for.

Consider Mankiw's textbook, which is by no means the worst one. It comes with an up-front "Principles" section. In a physics text, that would have the basic, (almost) undisputable statements that you can safely build the rest of your knowledge on. Like, “for every action there is an equal and opposite reaction.” But in Mankiw, that section teaches you that:

1. There’s a tradeoff between a clean environment and a high standard of living (completely untrue)

2. There’s a tradeoff between efficiency and equality (by that logic, the most unequal society is the most efficient)

3. When government increases safety regulations, people take bigger risks to keep their overall risks constant. (Sometimes actually true. But not true as an overall rule).

4. “Taxes adversely affect the allocation of resources, for they distort prices and thus the decisions of households and firms” (Only true in an imaginary economy where you’re imposing taxes on an otherwise perfectly functioning free market, something that has never been seen and never will be.)

5. Policies that directly control prices cause “great harm.” (A good rule of thumb, but not a universal truth—Medicare, for instance, controls prices, and it works better than the insane health-insurance system we have for everyone not on Medicare.)

6. “A higher level of prices is, in the long run, the primary effect of increasing the quantity of money.” (True if you assume full employment at all times, apart from whatever you're doing to the money supply, but why would you do that?)

7. Job creation is pointless, real progress comes from job destruction. (True if you assume full employment at all times, but again, why would you do that?)

Now, a person who continues studying economics will, or should, learn to take all of these with a truckful of salt. But many people don't. They go out and spout the econ-101 worldview as if it's the be-all and end-all. Economists rightly deride this as "econ 101-ism", but it's more than a bit weird to blame students for learning what they've been taught. After all, if you know the basic principles of physics, you've learned the bedrock foundation (so if someone claims to have invented a perpetual motion machine, you don't have to know anything except the law of conservation of energy to be pretty damn sure they haven't). A student can be forgiven for thinking that econ works the same way.

And when the econ profession produces maybe one actual economist for every hundred students who go no farther than their basic text (and remember nothing but some "principles"), that's a very real problem. Those people become voters, and politicians, and lawyers, and bankers, and other influential people who believe a distorted view of the world, and even often take pride in it, looking down on the findings of other social sciences if these findings contradict what they "know."

And then there's what we might call the attitude problem. Look at the other replies on this thread. Other social scientists don't think highly of economics because they "frequently misunderstand economics." Because economists are brave enough to "lay bare human motivations" (even though economists are notoriously terrible at evaluating how real individuals, much less people in society, are motivated or make decisions; look up "econs vs humans" if you care). Because economists nobly stand above politics while other social scientists are biased.

Let's look at the last statement. Going through Mankiw's points, note that all of them are highly political:

1. Don’t clean up the envrionment because you’ll lower standards of living

2. Don’t reduce inequality because you’ll make the overall pie smaller

3. Don’t impose safety regulations because people will just do more risky things

4. Don’t tax, because it screws up the economy

5. Don’t control prices, ever

6. Don’t bother increasing the money supply in slumps, because in the long run all you get is inflation

7. Don’t do anything to create jobs, or preserve them.

Really, it's really not too much to say that economics has conservative political content baked in.

An analogy: I'm old enough to remember when Marxism was still a thing. Not what's called Marxism in the social sciences today, but straight-up doctrinaire, you're-going-into-the-dustbin-of-history Marxism. Marxists called themselves "scientific," not because they were in fact following scientific methods, but because they started with principles and derived their whole world logically from them. (In fact, Marx deliberately started with economists' own principles and used their own methods to show how communism was inevitable, and his mistakes were their mistakes as well, but I digress.) My point is, Marxists thought they were being objective, not political. And if you criticized them, well, you just didn't understand. You hadn't read Capital carefully several times, and Grundrisse, and Critique of the Gotha Programme, and so on.

But of course, only a true believer--someone who found Marxist politics congenial--would do that in the first place.

Similarly, you're not too likely to get deep into economics in the first place unless you find the conservative worldview appealing. There are left-leaning economists, but they are mostly also "heterodox"--that is, they have a problem with the basic methodology of mainstream economics as well as its conclusions, which makes sense given that the methodology has a strong tendency to lead one to conservative conclusions.

And continuing with the Marxist analogy, it was completely legitimate to criticize Marxism based, not on its scholarship, but on its real-world results--to understand that there obviously must be something wrong with it if it led to the gulag and the Cultural Revolution and the killing fields.

Similarly, when social scientists look at the real-world results of economics, they see the rise and triumph of neoliberalism all over the world. Now, this is kind of unfair--other real-world results go under the radar because there is basically a consensus around them. So, for instance, nobody I'm aware of argues that China shouldn't have freed its economy, or that India was wrong to do so. But on the other hand, neoliberals often claim these countries as neoliberal success stories, which they aren't. In any case, neoliberalism itself has a lot to answer for, and it is totally grounded in mainstream economics, and specifically in "Econ 101-ism"--it makes little sense from any other perspective. So social scientists have a point when they think that something must be wrong with mainstream economics if it led to the Asian crash, Putin's Russia, the worldwide depression we're just now coming out of, the torture of Greece, etc. etc. etc.

None of which is to say that every social science critique of econ is right, or that economists don't have legit critiques of the other social sciences. The point is that other social scientists' view of economics is a bit more sophisticated than "we just don't get it" or "we're scared of the truth."