Let me help you with that R1:

His description of prescription is very good indeed, ill probably be stealing it.

Standard economic theory provides useful tools, but it focuses on a very limited range of causal factors — mainly the choices of millions of consumers, investors and firms — which it simplifies and assumes to be governed entirely by self-interested pursuit of goods or financial gain.

TIL only broad macro exists. Economics is useful in any situation you have people interacting with other people, it encompasses all aspects of behavior and decisions. The political issues that have prevented Greece from reforming before the crisis hit is a textbook example of public choice theory.

Also any behavioral economist would strongly object to the idea we can only consider behavior on a rational basis.

In John Stuart Mill’s view, which I believe is basically correct, economics is a separate and inexact science. It is separate from the other social sciences, because it focuses on only a small number of the causal factors that influence social phenomena. It is inexact because the phenomena with which it deals are influenced by many other causes than the few it focuses on.

I'm not sure the views of an economist that practiced before economics existed as a seperate discipline and predated the introduction of math to the field by nearly a century is particularly useful to consider in a discussion of the philosophy of science and how it applies to econ.

For a much simpler illustration than the case of Greece, consider current debates about whether to raise the minimum wage. This is not just an economic question, because the minimum wage may have all sorts of effects. (It might, for example, shore up families and improve the lives of children.) One might believe, naïvely, that the economic effect would be simply to raise the wages of those who are currently earning the minimum wages.

These are all economic effects that we can study and understand. The rest of the interview continues like this, his entire basis of argument seems to be that simplistic models (in the case of MW SD) form the basis of modern economic understanding and we are incapable of dealing with complex systems.