The study of economics has often been criticized for a vatiety of reasons. what are those reasons?

Neoclassical economics is sometimes criticized for having a normative bias. In this view, it does not focus on explaining actual economies but instead on describing a "utopia" in which Pareto optimality applies. In the opinion of some developers of an alternative approach, the purpose of neoclassical economics is "to demonstrate the social optimality if the real world were to resemble the model", not "to explain the real world as observed empirically".

In his book Economics as Religion: From Samuelson to Chicago and Beyond, the economist Robert Nelson argued that "the priesthood of a modern secular religion of economic progress" has promoted a narrow interpretation of economic efficiency, disguised in the form of mathematics.