If economists did come to a broad consensus, many politicians would still ignore that consensus if it didn't happen to fit their worldview or the interests of their major donors.
See: climate science.
Why Were Economists as a Group as Useless Over 2010-2014 as Over 1929-1935?
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Re: Why Were Economists as a Group as Useless Over 2010-2014 as Over 1929-1935?
#32If economists did come to a broad consensus, many politicians would still ignore that consensus if it didn't happen to fit their worldview or the interests of their major donors.
See: climate science.
Re: Why Were Economists as a Group as Useless Over 2010-2014 as Over 1929-1935?
#33From what it looks in these comments, almost no one read this article nor know who Bradford Delong is. He's a New Keynesian, arguing no one listened to Keynesians...
Re: Why Were Economists as a Group as Useless Over 2010-2014 as Over 1929-1935?
#34It's great there isn't a "consensus" between economists, otherwise if that consensus was wrong we would never be able to leave it, like what happens in other sciences.
"If everyone is thinking alike, then somebody isn't thinking." - George S. Patton
Re: Why Were Economists as a Group as Useless Over 2010-2014 as Over 1929-1935?
#35If economists did come to a broad consensus, many politicians would still ignore that consensus if it didn't happen to fit their worldview or the interests of their major donors. See: climate science.
My Gosh, that is an extremely salient and DEEPLY DEPRESSING point.
I've been drawn to question what to do about that quite often, but I havent happened across an acceptable answer as yet.
Re: Why Were Economists as a Group as Useless Over 2010-2014 as Over 1929-1935?
#36Because economics has always been utterly useless in any practical sense. It makes no testable predictions and is no more scientific than any theology. Only because it clothes its dogmas in symbolic notation is it accorded even the slightest bit of respect. The sooner we jettison it from our epistenic frames, the more quickly we will return to something that at least partially resembles sanity.
Re: Why Were Economists as a Group as Useless Over 2010-2014 as Over 1929-1935?
#37Two things in our universe that are impossible: Modeling chaos and knowing the future.
Economists model chaos and use that model to predict the future.
Re: Why Were Economists as a Group as Useless Over 2010-2014 as Over 1929-1935?
#38Earlier quoted context omitted.
Why not? Minimising these impacts it's about finances, not economics. I.E Economics is about predicting these things (which they absolutely didn't), finances is about putting mechanisms in place so that if they happen they will be minimised.
Economics is not about predicting, it's about understanding things. It's basically impossible to do the former at scale for time periods over 6 months, we're slowly getting better at the latter. One big reason economic forecasting is so hard is that agents in the system you are forecasting are taking your present period forecast into account when acting in future periods.
Plenty of people I know were predicting the crash of 2008 at least a year out - sometimes more.
Fortunately, none of them were qualified economists.
Macro is actually pretty straightforward to do.
But economics is politics by other means. It is not a science - it's a branch of rhetoric and persuasion (i.e. propaganda) and is used to disguise and rationalise purely political decisions that would otherwise be impossible to justify.
Re: Why Were Economists as a Group as Useless Over 2010-2014 as Over 1929-1935?
#39If economists did come to a broad consensus, many politicians would still ignore that consensus if it didn't happen to fit their worldview or the interests of their major donors. See: climate science.
One could scarcely call the field of Economics a science though.
Re: Why Were Economists as a Group as Useless Over 2010-2014 as Over 1929-1935?
#40If economists did come to a broad consensus, many politicians would still ignore that consensus if it didn't happen to fit their worldview or the interests of their major donors. See: climate science.
As it turns out, Republicans and Democrats agree with each other much more than they agree with economists.
https://cclark.gcsu.edu/Survey%20of%20Republicans,%20Democra...
> Republicans and Democrats show identical distributions of responses for 18 propositions (41 percent) while economists and Democrats show identical distributions for 7 propositions (16 percent) and economists and Republicans share identical response distributions for 9 propositions (20 percent). These results suggest a gap between the economic views of the political parties and economists’ views.