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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: 1) by khallow on Friday September 01 2017, @01:59AM
Wow. The first sentence is wrong. There is a remarkable success in economics, including I might add real world support of some of the concepts introduced by Austrian economics. What is missed here is that economics like some other fields (climate research and nutrition science, to name a couple of examples) has high levels of conflict of interest, particularly of the financial and ideological sorts. So there is a lot of noise, ulterior motives, and other shenanigans diluting what would otherwise be mundane observation and theory building, like say geology or astronomy.
And if you're not basing economics on reason (which I'll note here I strongly dispute as a viewpoint of Austrian economists), then you're not basing it on anything at all. Reason is the key difference between pursuit of knowledge and ignorance. Absence of reason is not a epistemological difference. Instead, it is the difference between thinking at a high, complex level and not.