I wonder if the majority of philosophers today have never read Plato; or, there are
historians who've never read Gibbon?
  
I suspect that there are many chemists who've never read Boyle and mathematicians who are
ignorant of Pythagoras(other than what they get in textbooks), as well as physicists
who've never turned a page of Newton.
  
That seems the crux of the matter; economists who've fallen for the scientistic fallacy
think of their work in the same sense as do many physical scientists.  The rest of us
regard our subject in a different context.
  
Sam Bostaph