There is an element of this, because the people using it for policy or writing headlines always disregard a ton of caveats and qualifications in any field (including actual hard science like physics), but most economics texts I’ve read hide a ton of complexity behind “rationality” that doesn’t exist and are implicitly describing the system that we have (capitalism) without acknowledging that we could do it any other way - which frees them from any ethical conflict with capital/exploitation and lets them pretend they are describing a natural system.

The truth is we are irrational both as individuals and as groups with outside influences, and the economy can function in whatever way we want it to function. In that lens economics quickly turns into psychology, ethics and philosophy. Which, to be clear, would be a useful thing to study in any economic system (all of which have incentives and pitfalls), but it is not nearly as objective or concrete as it currently pretends as it fiddles with interest rates while billionaires run roughshod over our entire society.

There’s a famous quote about economics that goes something along the lines of “the market can remain irrational longer than you can remain solvent,” which I think summarizes everything pretty nicely. Humans are chaotic and largely unpredictable creatures, and economics is a science devoted to trying to pull deterministic data out of inherently nondeterministic people. Sometimes they’re even pretty on point about it. But in all cases it is, best case, an educated guess.