How To Fix The Economy

[Presley Cannady]

I studied economic science for several years at a West German university, focused on macroeconomics, have a degree on it and I know enough economic theories* and papers to know that this stuff is science.

Great, then it should be easy for you to point to a single economic relation or model that produces better forecasts than flipping a coin. Doesn't have to be general; conditional is fine, too.

I knew about how the Euro zone will run into the exact troubles of today before the € was introduced because economic scientists had worked on the necessary theories back in the early 90's (each one for every advantage or disadvantage of monetary unions), because my professors had told me about those theories and because the micro experiment of monetary union in re-unified Germany was already supporting those theories.
Meanwhile the public - including those who disparage(d) economic science - had no clue about it.

At the very least, you should be able to describe the models and datasets you used so we can verify this prediction by backcast. That also would meet the challenge's criteria.

Making more use of economic science would improve policy a lot. (As of today, lawyers are more influential in policy than economists are - and it shows.)

Lawyers are pretty good because they play a game with rules of their own making. Economists don't have that luxury.

Oh, btw, I will tell the physicists that they shall never again call Newtonian Physics "science" because they're only "simple observations", and some guy on the internet meant that this doesn't count as science. Or I won't.

Feel free. Who's going to argue that mechanics isn't founded on some very simple observations defining the time, displacement and mass in a coordinate system? Once your formalism is in place, the actual science is the meaningful relations between these quantities--conservation of energy, momentum, and angular momentum and derivatives thereof.

[Fuchs]

Great, then it should be easy for you to point to a single economic relation or model that produces better forecasts than flipping a coin. Doesn't have to be general; conditional is fine, too.

Sure I can.
It's pointless, though.

I've discussed with/against people like you before. I do this only in order to keep maybe one or two readers here from falling for your nonsense.

It would be entirely pointless to provide any more examples because you wouldn't take them seriously, but discuss on and on - no matter what kind of evidence I provide.


In short: I don't take you seriously because of what you wrote so far.

[Presley Cannady]

Sure I can.
It's pointless, though.

I've discussed with/against people like you before. I do this only in order to keep maybe one or two readers here from falling for your nonsense.

Let's assume my position is nonsense. Then wouldn't the easiest means to dispense with this back and forth be to point to

It would be entirely pointless to provide any more examples...

You haven't provided one, yet. All you've offered is:
1. the unfalsifiable assertion that deficits are unsustainable on an arbitrarily long time scale.
2. a point that market failures are inevitable; trivial in that the only evidence needed to sustain it is the observation that market failures have occurred, and...
3. a demonstrably false claim that unemployment insurance is commercially sold nowhere in the world.

...because you wouldn't take them seriously, but discuss on and on - no matter what kind of evidence I provide.

I've already cornered myself pretty well for your benefit. I'll accept any relation or model in the field of economics--or the whole of social sciences, for that matter--that generates falsifiable predictions with better accuracy than flipping a fair coin. Simple, no?

[slapout9]

the Coin Toss Economic Theory......very valid concept I might add. In any Economic transaction there is always the rigged criminal element present, something that so called economic science could never grasp Link to "No Country For Old Men-Coin Toss Scene"


http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mhXJcfczNIc

[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?