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I was distracted by this passage:

> What this argument misses is that the stakes of bad economics are often far higher than bad physics: being wrong about gravitational waves may cost you tenure, but being wrong about the minimum wage might condemn tens of millions to poverty.

Which leads me to believe that the author has a seriously myopic view of Physics and how much it permeates everyday life.

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While physics can explain a lot of everyday life, you don't need to actually know it, understand it, or even be correct about it to use the effects. Humans built structures long before we formalized the definition of gravity, but they still stood up. We don't YOLO astronauts in the first draft of a spaceship design and hope for the best, but that's pretty much how economics works.

> While physics can explain a lot of everyday life, you don't need to actually know it, understand it, or even be correct about it to use the effects.

The author is not referring to ordinary people though. Let me paraphrase the quoted text:

> What this argument misses is that the stakes of bad economics are often far higher than bad physics: [physicists] being wrong about gravitational waves may cost [them their] tenure, but [economists] being wrong about the minimum wage might condemn tens of millions to poverty.

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