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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: 2) by maxwell demon on Thursday August 31 2017, @06:28AM
I cannot find that claim anywhere in the post you replied to. Quite the opposite, indeed: It contains explicit examples both of bad private spending and of good government spending (although I don't agree that this specific example is indeed a good cause to spend government money; fighting cancer would have been a much better example).
Also note that if there's an optimum that doesn't sit at 0% (and it is quite obvious that 0% cannot maximise your tax revenue), it also means that it is possible that the current taxes are below that optimum, and that you therefore should increase taxes to increase revenue.
Moreover note that khallow's argument means that the government can influence where that optimum sits. It can raise that optimum by improving the spending. So if a government happens to tax at the optimum tax rate, and then decides to improve on its spending, then according to khallow's argument this means the optimum tax rate rises, and therefore the government should increase the tax rate accordingly in order to get back into the optimum.
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.