Yeah, a system can be extensively studied and understood even if it's a bad system.

Ehh, that feels like a stretch. This is a valid, if potentially outdated critique that is commonly acknowledged in the field. I could see my old Econ professor hanging this meme outside her office.

Economics is absolutely a valid field of study.

Economists are also mostly employed to serve the interests of the rich. They are a primary source of the useless metrics we hear on the news that truly reflect only the experience and interest of those who have enough money to respond to that info.

There are many other methods developed by non-shill economists that we never hear about unless one goes digging into more obscure academic literature.

The Gini coefficient is one example. It is a perfectly valid way of framing and interpreting economic data, but one almost never sees it in popular media. Why?

The people that buy economists and media don’t even want to have the conversation about income inequality.

So, yes, economics is a valid area of study that has some valid methods.

Also, most economists are intellectually dishonest and compromised shills for entrenched wealth.

Two things can be true at the same time.

I'd happily see the Œdipus complex meme. Psychologists deserve to be endlessly clowned on as long as Freudian theory keeps getting taught and practiced by licensed professionals instead of being relegated to the history of the sciences alongside bloodletting and humors theory.

Academic fields are collectively responsible for these actively harmful ideas (psychoanalysis and homo economicus) being continuously propagated by ill-intentioned or incompetent academics. I don't care that these theories are now "widely considered outdated" or whatever the fuck, proponents of this quackery are actively giving interviews and teaching classes and no-one in their field is seriously considering stripping them of their credentials. That's more than enough justification for the mockery.

I feel like this is incredibly misleading to clip out of the abstract when just above it we have:

If the hierarchy hypothesis is correct, then researchers in “softer” sciences should have fewer constraints to their conscious and unconscious biases, and therefore report more positive outcomes. Results confirmed the predictions at all levels considered: discipline, domain and methodology broadly defined. Controlling for observed differences between pure and applied disciplines, and between papers testing one or several hypotheses, the odds of reporting a positive result were around 5 times higher among papers in the disciplines of Psychology and Psychiatry and Economics and Business compared to Space Science, 2.3 times higher in the domain of social sciences compared to the physical sciences, and 3.4 times higher in studies applying behavioural and social methodologies on people compared to physical and chemical studies on non-biological material. In all comparisons, biological studies had intermediate values. These results suggest that the nature of hypotheses tested and the logical and methodological rigour employed to test them vary systematically across disciplines and fields, depending on the complexity of the subject matter and possibly other factors (e.g., a field's level of historical and/or intellectual development). On the other hand,

To clip the quote just after the statement "on the other hand" to give the definitive conclusion of the paper is pretty wack. Like the paper is literally titled “Positive” Results Increase Down the Hierarchy of the Sciences

Further I think this meme isn't about the fact that it's literally impossible to do economics, or that there is nothing worth studying in markets. More that the orthodoxy and biases of economics muddy the field to the point of dishonesty, shown here as being 5 times more likely to be right when you can massage the factors compared to telescope data.