In general, I would agree that predictive economics is… dicey at best. But economics is at its best when it’s making an effort to understand why things happen, and how to correct them - the value judgements of whether they should be corrected are a different matter entirely.
Like an engineer who’s asked to draw up plans for a dam - they realize and must sketch out the benefits and expenses, but ultimately, it isn’t, and shouldn’t be, the engineer making the final decision. The expert, ideally, is there to inform the decision makers of the possible options and what they mean.
I was implying something else, which you might disagree with but I’ll restate just in case using your analogy. I’m implying that economists are like two engineers each drawing up their own plan for the dam, where building according to one of the plans results in a sound dam, whereas the other results in a dam wall collapse a couple of years down the road and catastrophic downstream flood. And often there’s no good way to tell which plan is the sound one until the you build it and see if you get a flood or not. I’m not even entering the should we build the dam area or not. 😅 I’ll give you that I feel like there’s more empiricism today than 50 or 100 years ago but it’s still far from where I’d like it to be, given how influential it is to people’s lives. Again this is my opinion based on my observations which you don’t have to agree with. I did not downvote.
That’s not entirely wrong, I’d say. Like I said, predictive economics are dicey. But one thing economists have made significant progress on in the past century is understanding why things happen and what effects they have. They can tell you what will happen if the dice come up snake eyes - just don’t put too much stock in when they predict you’ll roll it, or how to get it.
In general, I would agree that predictive economics is… dicey at best. But economics is at its best when it’s making an effort to understand why things happen, and how to correct them - the value judgements of whether they should be corrected are a different matter entirely.
Like an engineer who’s asked to draw up plans for a dam - they realize and must sketch out the benefits and expenses, but ultimately, it isn’t, and shouldn’t be, the engineer making the final decision. The expert, ideally, is there to inform the decision makers of the possible options and what they mean.
I was implying something else, which you might disagree with but I’ll restate just in case using your analogy. I’m implying that economists are like two engineers each drawing up their own plan for the dam, where building according to one of the plans results in a sound dam, whereas the other results in a dam wall collapse a couple of years down the road and catastrophic downstream flood. And often there’s no good way to tell which plan is the sound one until the you build it and see if you get a flood or not. I’m not even entering the should we build the dam area or not. 😅 I’ll give you that I feel like there’s more empiricism today than 50 or 100 years ago but it’s still far from where I’d like it to be, given how influential it is to people’s lives. Again this is my opinion based on my observations which you don’t have to agree with. I did not downvote.
That’s not entirely wrong, I’d say. Like I said, predictive economics are dicey. But one thing economists have made significant progress on in the past century is understanding why things happen and what effects they have. They can tell you what will happen if the dice come up snake eyes - just don’t put too much stock in when they predict you’ll roll it, or how to get it.