Economists versus the Economy

I'm familiar with work in he philosophy of science. Is there a growing interest with he philosophy of economics?

I don't agree with everything Skidelsky (the author) writes, but his main point rings true:

"Today’s professional economists... have studied almost nothing but economics. They don’t even read the classics of their own discipline. Economic history comes, if at all, from data sets. Philosophy, which could teach them about the limits of the economic method, is a closed book. Mathematics, demanding and seductive, has monopolized their mental horizons. The economists are the idiots savants of our time."

In other words, they lack what Charlie Munger calls "elementary worldly wisdom:" https://old.ycombinator.com/munger.html.

Yeah, it's not exactly a mystery what is happening; many central bank policy makers (contrary to the optimistic but unsourced charters toon of QE expectations in TFA) have been quite blunt about the limitations of monetary policy, while in many large economies that have substantial impact on the global situation (especially, but not exclusively, the US) the authorities with power over fiscal policy have refused to intervene (or intervened in the opposite direction that would be represented by the "usual levers") for ideological reasons. The results have been predictably disastrous, but it's not a failure of mainstream economics.

EDIT: Which is not, at all, to say that there aren't real problems in economics, just that the article here isnt identifying the and is instead pushing a narrative that has been repeatedly advanced to pass of responsibility for dereliction of duty by legislators onto, well, anyone else.

I'm not sure if this article brings up anything new but it fans my crisis of epistemology all the same.

I've always been a good "the academics know what they're talking about" believer, but lately I've started having doubts.

I went to MIT and many of my good friends and peers went onto PhDs in the hard sciences (Princeton/CERN, Harvard CfA, CalTech chemistry) so I've always been impressed, almost reverential, towards them and the discoveries of their fields.

But as we branch away from physics, astronomy, chemistry, what I used to almost take on faith I'm now growing doubtful about. This excellent blog post[0] by Columbia statistics Professor paints the state of modern Psychology research unflatteringly. And then there's this post[1] looking at a parallel universe of scientists studying, peer reviewing, and publishing (in their own journals) parapsychology (being "psychic" and all that). I'd call it "cargo cult" science, but at much more than a superficial level it resembles many "real" scientific disciplines in terms of meta analyses, p-values, etc. I personally majored in Math and Econ, and for my Econ classes I did my fair share of modeling and teasing out effects from their confounding variables, etc, and was always a little leery about it all. It doesn't really surprise me that the Fed has written that Economics, too, is suffering a replication crisis[2].

But then how far does it go, and where do I go from here? I don't have the time or inclination to study to an expert level all these soft science fields and form my own opinions. What fields are as sturdy as particle physics? Medicine? Biology? Climate change? It's a slippery slope to anti-intellectualism but I feel myself slipping.

[0] http://andrewgelman.com/2016/09/21/what-has-happened-down-he...

[1] http://slatestarcodex.com/2014/04/28/the-control-group-is-ou...

[2] https://www.federalreserve.gov/econresdata/feds/2015/files/2...

Exactly. This is the real reason why economists get it so wrong: their incentives.

Brad DeLong in particular is a real piece of work: http://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2016/06/clinton-loyalist-autc...