Economists should take credit for the deteriorating quality of existence. For it is their philistine notions of personal and national welfare that have helped to ruin the natural world; confused technology with culture; reduced art to money, time to interest, sexual relations to pornography, friendship to advantage, and liberty to shopping, and wasted whole generations who, because they have only been taught to think in categories of money, have, in Schopenhauer's phrase, 'missed the purpose of existence'."

From Diane Coyle's article at Opendemocracy, where she argues why Buchan is wrong. (And plugs her new book on the subject.)