This response is a defense of neoclassical economics. Neoclassical economics contains more than the perfectly competitive model: much of it concerns the problems of market failure including public goods, externalities, imperfect structure, and asymmetric information. The article acknowledges that economic models are abstract, but argues that abstraction can be useful, and that full-blown utility theory is not required to gain insights from the concepts. Neoclassical economics helps us understand how the world works.
