How To Fix The Economy

[Entropy]

Lots of ad hominem floating around in here. Still, here's my 2 cents: Economics, like most social sciences, is a descriptive science, not a predictive science.

[Presley Cannady]

Lots of ad hominem floating around in here.

I wouldn't say that. I'm denouncing an entire field with, as Fuchs points out, tens of thousands of lettered participants. Once all the arguments are laid out, the line of credulity between proto-/pseudoscience and the real deal is a question of credulity popularity. So surely my own credibility is germane.

Still, here's my 2 cents: Economics, like most social sciences, is a descriptive science, not a predictive science.

We can certainly define science in such a way that forecasting is irrelevant, but you'll still have a bright line between all the natural sciences (which are predictive--and successfully so at that) and everything else (including the social sciences, humanities, piano, history, and the culinary arts).

That's not to say that "everything else" is useless. History, tradition and ritual, instinct, and the individual and popular accumulation of every day experience have shaped intuition for far longer than the natural sciences. However, the core business of economics is to make forecasts over future measures of income and wealth. And if we can't think of a single product of economic thought that generates better forecasts than a coin flip, then isn't it reasonable to ask how useful the field really is?