In the process, they assumed away the models’ limitations and caveats. Convenience, and not conviction, dictated the choices that economists made. As the Economist magazine put it so well, economists got seduced by their models, fooling themselves that what the models leave out does not matter.
This penchant of economists to build models determined more by what they can rather than what they should is best illustrated by the joke that I am sure most of you heard – about a drunkard who lost his keys and was searching for them under a lamp post not because he lost the keys there but because that is where light was.