Relsqui:

I'm sure this wasn't your intent, but this comes across to me like a situation where you've been having a high-level conversation about economics and then switch to asking the conomist to explain or justify the basic premises of the field to you.

The thing is, if you ask a physicist to answer a critical question you have about some fundamental thing in physics, he'll likely be able to point you to the literature where your specific conundrum is resolved clearly and in great detail, or provide such an answer himself. I don't know what would happen if you came up with an entirely novel question (I sure never did), but from what I've observed, I would expect that it would be met with genuine curiosity. Moreover, good introductory literature in physics often anticipates and preemptively answers many objections to the basic concepts that a smart critical student of the subject might come up with. Of course, if you're being block-headed and impervious to arguments, that's a different story, but that's not what I'm talking about.

In contrast, in economics one rarely sees anything like this. The concepts are presented with an air of high authority, and various more or less straightforward questions about their validity that occur to me after some thinking are often left unaddressed. Mathematical models are typically discussed in a bizarre blinkered way that bears no resemblance to the ingenious modes of thought that I've learned to know and love from mathematicians and physicists. Even more maddeningly, one sometimes runs into literature written by prominent insiders in the field that points out such problems, but instead of provoking debate, these works are languishing in obscurity. There are many other bizarre things I've found in my amateur forays into the field, which could be the subject of a long essay.