Further to this critique of neoclassical economic theory, this is a rather savage indictment of the field.
http://thewildpeak.wordpress.com/2012/07/26/887/This author's proposition is that in the days of Smith and Ricardo and Hume etc, all economists were "political economists". They were practical people who were concerned with the real world, and they were aware of the consequences of our economic decision making on people's lives. Thus you get Adam Smith warning about the dangers of unfettered power for the wealthy etc.
As other authors have noted, that changed, and economics. along with other studies of humanity (and indeed most of us in the western world) became bedazzled by the success of the natural sciences. The scientific method is phenomenally useful for somethings: in its ideal form it is a very good way of approaching any problem which can me made amenable to its methods, and its range is greater than we could have suspected when it was being developed. But it is not unlimited, and overgeneralisation has become part of the problem. Most of the so called social sciences have made very little progress in the last century: and I believe that is because they are trying to ape the means and success of hard science in fields where that is not helpful or even appropriate.
Like Mr Lawson, the author linked here sees the genesis of the problem in that shift from "political economy" to an economics limited to science and maths. But he goes rather further: for this author charges that, in seeking to follow a scientific method, economics adopted a conception of economic activity which was based on Newtonian physics. Newtonian physics does not even work in large parts of physics, though it is very useful in some areas. But it has this crucial feature: we are all familiar with the notion of "modelling" and we know that this is a process whereby we exclude a number of real world features so that we can study the thing we are interested in. So, for example, we assume that there is no friction when we want to consider the interactions of force and mass. That is handy and produces useful insights: but it depends on being right about two things: first you have to know what is relevant to what you propose to study: and second, your ideal model must yield falsifiable predictions in the real world. Those interact: if the predictions do not pass the real world test your model is wrong and you must revisit the hypothesis. That is the central feature of hard science, at least according to Popper. That is what is missing from all of the social sciences: nothing is ever comprehensively disproved and abandoned, because the other essential: the "crucial experiment" is not available: it is either unethical, or the phenomena studied are too complex for identification and control of all the variables. That may not always be true: we may develop a mathematics capable of handling the complexities: but we do not have it yet and I am apt to think we never will. I think we need a new (or old) paradigm.
Be that as it may the important point about this article is his identification of much of the neoclassical theory with newtonian mechanics: because it does seem to have many features of that system, not least the notion of "equilibration" mentioned in the OP. As important is his observation that in adopting that approach economics has done something never seen in real world physics: it has taken time and space out of the picture, in the same way as friction is removed when we derive the law F=MA. I have mentioned in an earlier post that we can only ignore things when we know when and how they are relevant; else our predictions will be wrong. For many practical purposes we can ignore the difference between mass and weight, for example: but only because we know both exist, and we know when the distinction matters.
According to this author there are economists who recognise this: but they are not mainstream and they are not the ones influencing policy.
