The reason these predictions were wrong was because they were politically biased, not grounded in operational understandings and compared to faulty or misleading historical data. But this is what so much of economics is these days. It’s not science at all. It’s mostly just politics masquerading as science. And so here we are with this muddled mess of understandings and a policy perspective that no one can agree on and actually appears to be resulting in almost no progress. It’s a sad state of affairs if you ask me and isn’t helping anyone get any closer to understanding our reality.Pragmatic Capitalism
Do Economists Figure out how the World Really Works?
Cullen Roche
3 comments:
Anything that involves the interaction of humans is always going to be about politics.
Because politics is about the interaction of humans.
Neil,
I’m not sure about your reasoning: “Anything that involves the interaction of humans is always going to be about politics.” Sex, dancing, playing poker, etc etc involves “interaction of humans”, but there’s not much politics there.
Re Cullen’s point, another important reason why economists don’t “figure out how the world really works” is that many of them are more interested in furthering their careers by getting stuff published regardless of whether the “stuff” bears any relationship to reality. And there’s good empirical evidence to support the idea that many academic economists don’t give a hoot about solving the real problems of the real world. See:
http://larspsyll.wordpress.com/2013/10/10/drivel-that-pass-academic-quality-control/#respond
"Sex, dancing, playing poker, etc etc involves “interaction of humans”, but there’s not much politics there."
Huh? Not much politics in sex?
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