Mark Buchanan is far off base here. He's basically arguing that Economist pass themselves off as objective analysts when in reality they're extremely subjective. But at worst, what he's arguing is that Economists should include in their analyses the things he believes are good and bad--"social disruption of a community," democracy, political power of corporations, and income inequality. At best, he's saying Economic analysis doesn't go deep enough into the system's complexities.
A good Economist doesn't make value judgments as Buchanan wants. He's not going to say a policy is bad because it hinders democracy because that presumes that democracy is "good." A good economist might say what effect something has on democracy without mentioning whether that's good or bad. That determination is for others to make.
Buchanan's right, though, that economists focus on the more immediate effects and ignore the deeper. That's only because the complexity of the world is infinite, and the deeper you go, the harder is the analysis. Maybe economists need to do a better job describing the limits of their research, but all economists know that there could be more to the story. Indeed, economists are much better at looking at the unseen effects than most other people because that's what they're trained to do (see the Broken Window Fallacy).
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