How I usually think of it: Economics as a field in bourgeois society is really just a set of assumptions at basis, and built from these models and theories that never utilize deep skills in any other field to deepen those theories. This, because it is constantly wrestling with making the basic assumptions fit to basic models which hold up to any significant amount.

So you get napkin graphs which could really be described better as “there’s a point where efficiency decreases per piece as you produce more with a given set of conditions”. But they draw it out for some reason, and try to calculate that using basic data.

But they also constantly reevaluate the conditions and how they effect how the assumptions combine/interact (oh the means aren’t being utilized well enough, so that’s why our curve fails in many cases) without ever considering a major change to basic assumptions.

This is hard on all fields–confronting failures in basic assumptions. But other fields do it eventually because their goal is explanatory power. Economics has as a goal contributing to economic success (as measured by bourgeois) above a truth about how it objectively works so they never have to confront it