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When Christopher Nolan was promoting his previous film Interstellar, he made the casual observation that "Take a field like economics for example. [Unlike physics] you have real material things and it can't predict anything. It's always wrong." There is a lot more truth in that statement than most academic economists would like to admit.
[...] several famous Keynesian and neo-classical economists, including Paul Romer, [...] criticized the "Mathiness in the Theory of Economic Growth" and [...] Paul Krugman. In this instance, though, Krugman is mostly correct observing that "As I see it, the economics profession went astray because economists, as a group, mistook beauty, clad in impressive-looking mathematics, for truth."
[...] But more fundamentally, as Austrian economist Frank Shostak notes, "In the natural sciences, a laboratory experiment can isolate various elements and their movements. There is no equivalent in the discipline of economics. The employment of econometrics and econometric model-building is an attempt to produce a laboratory where controlled experiments can be conducted."
The result is that economic forecasts are usually just wrong."
"[Levinovitz] approvingly quotes one economist saying "The interest of the profession is in pursuing its analysis in a language that's inaccessible to laypeople and even some economists. What we've done is monopolise this kind of expertise.[...] that gives us power.""
[...] because economics models are mostly useless and cannot predict the future with any sort of certainty, then centrally directing an economy would be effectively like flying blind. The failure of economic models to pan out is simply more proof of the pretense of knowledge. And it's not more knowledge that we need, it's more humility. The humility to know that "wise" bureaucrats are not the best at directing a market "
Economists Are the New Astrologers
(Score: 4, Insightful) by Mykl on Wednesday August 30 2017, @06:44AM (4 children)
I picked this up, all eager to dive into a rich history of human progress. Unfortunately, the first 10 pages of the introduction/prologue turned out to be an apology for all Western progress and explaining why Western Europe was definitely not the smartest civilization (far from it, the author knows 'heaps' of people from other races who he thinks are way smarter!) just because they happened to be the ones that made all these major advances in technology, medicine, government, the arts and many other fields over the past few centuries. It was overbearing and smacked of an attempt to avoid being labelled racist by the PC Police, merely for describing a chronology of events in a particular part of the world at a particular time.
I didn't think I had it in me to be preached to for another several hundred pages. Pity, as the subject matter sounds really interesting.
(Score: 0, Troll) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday August 30 2017, @07:19AM (2 children)
Truth sure is a hard pill for some people to swallow. To sink below the pinnacle of human achievement, who could bear that?
(Score: -1, Troll) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday August 30 2017, @04:43PM (1 child)
White prividege is based on luck, not racial superiority? Who knew!!
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday August 31 2017, @02:30AM
Privilege is based on 1) the desire to push your wishlist onto others, and 2) having sufficient wisdom to compel it.
( Wisdom includes figuring out how to use the other's resources. Having a gun is no good if you can't figure out how to hang onto it.)
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday August 30 2017, @06:27PM
I didn't think I had it in me to be preached to for another several hundred pages. Pity, as the subject matter sounds really interesting.
So you're saying that you couldn't put down your social exceptionalism long enough to read something "really interesting". You're right. it is a pity.