In Praise of Blindspots
Any social science that aims to inform (and perform) the function of a complex social organization, like a state or corporation, that enforces even somewhat impartial rules needs to ruthlessly abstract from particularities. In particular, it must use mathematics, for making incommensurable claims commensurable, for representing the workings of fantastically complex adaptive systems, and for complementarity with technologies of organizational administration, like spreadsheets...
A democratic government capable of exerting effective power over a massive social provisioning system without degenerating into corruption, capture, or chaos, should have a comprehensible logic to its rules, even if that logic is flawed. One of the attractions of price theory to judges in the Manne program on law and economics was that it simplified a vast amount of precedent in domains of the law (like antitrust) that seemed to be endlessly nuanced. And the simple/simplistic framework provided by marginal revenue and marginal cost curves imposed enough coherence on the subject that many judges decided to Fuck Nuance...
A powerful representation of the world is one that is maximally sparse while correctly handling new situations...
Perhaps thankfully, economics is done being a master metaphor for governance for the foreseeable future.