https://np.reddit.com/r/Economics/comments/3e2qjh/reconomics_open_thread/ctb5kv8

R1: First we have some garden variety people aren't rational therefore economics is wrong:

"But the world isn't like that, and people who think the world is like that have a very small innate feeling for how gigantic economics is in terms scale, diversity, culture, politics, etc. etc. And one of the first things to correct are the basic assumptions of microeconomics. Individuals are not rational, not well informed, there are barriers to entry and exit and people aren't always operating in their best interest. These corrections scale with firms to an extent, and scale with nations and distinct structures. "

Economists don't think that people actually sit down and solve lagrangians all day. Instead rationality is just an approximation which allows us to better describe human behavior. As long as the predictions that rationality gives us check out the fact that we are making unrealistic assumptions doesn't matter. Most of the counter examples to rationality he has mentioned aren't actually counterexamples. Rationality, as it is colloquially used, just means that agents try to do the best they can to satisfy their preferences. Many models assume that agents do not have perfect information. Industrial organization studies barriers to entry and exit. Behavioral economics has looked into the fact that people may have preferences over fairness or altruism.

The rest of the post suffers from a serious case of buzzwords. Supposedly rationality is like quantum mechanics it only holds on small scales.

"My point is that the smaller you get, the more personal responsibility, hard work, and reasonable/logical action plays into microeconomic decisions, the obvious solution is to let all of us rational, fully informed, equal bargaining power people engage in unfettered and untaxed business. "

Then there's this:

"With macro however, economic activity ceases to study distinct interactions between sovereign units of exchange. It then becomes more of a study and practice of economic environments and ecological biomes. This is where macroeconomics comes into play, it confronts the randomness of microeconomics (whether interactions align with the assumptions), and instead becomes observational and sometimes experimental. It takes the aggregate of behavior and attempts to seek the root causes of say, a housing market crash, not the irresponsible behavior of individual mortgage lenders. It tries to divine the health of economies, and then provides prescriptions to improve health rather than fix symptoms. "

Microeconomics has more contact with the data and is less likely to have a stochastic element in its models. Experiments are much more likely to be found in micro. This whole post doesn't understand how modern macro is done either. Modern macro starts with microeconomics and tries to understand aggregate behavior as the result the interactions of utility maximizing agents. There's no similarity to ecology. We've already tried to do macro with aggreates alone and it doesn't work due to things like the Lucas Critique.