“If reality was the thing we made up, the thing we made up would be science” isn’t a great defense. Neoclassical economics is not science, it’s barely even a semi-coherent fairy tale.
It’s more “if people quit trying to break the system to enrich themselves, and the politicians actually agreed to empower the agencies which are supposed to oversee and regulate large companies and financial institutions, and we actually listened to the data instead of the soundbites that sound good as long as you don’t think about them much, we’d be much better off.”
Economists are not in charge of anything, politicians and rich people are. And they aren’t incentivized to run things like an economist, because then they would make less money.
Just because the people with an incentive to blow up the economy to make money end up blowing up the economy to make more money every few years doesn’t mean economics is at fault for that. It’s like saying climate science isn’t real because earlier projections of global warming were more optimistic, when the real reason is the science was suppressed and downplayed by the people making boatloads of money off fossil fuels.
The correct analogy would be if the climate deniers working for Chevron were held up as field experts, and that the institution of climate science stood behind them, then anyone who pointed it out was just told we need to organise agriculture on more +4.5 degree compatible terms.
“If reality was the thing we made up, the thing we made up would be science” isn’t a great defense. Neoclassical economics is not science, it’s barely even a semi-coherent fairy tale.
It’s more “if people quit trying to break the system to enrich themselves, and the politicians actually agreed to empower the agencies which are supposed to oversee and regulate large companies and financial institutions, and we actually listened to the data instead of the soundbites that sound good as long as you don’t think about them much, we’d be much better off.”
Economists are not in charge of anything, politicians and rich people are. And they aren’t incentivized to run things like an economist, because then they would make less money.
Just because the people with an incentive to blow up the economy to make money end up blowing up the economy to make more money every few years doesn’t mean economics is at fault for that. It’s like saying climate science isn’t real because earlier projections of global warming were more optimistic, when the real reason is the science was suppressed and downplayed by the people making boatloads of money off fossil fuels.
The correct analogy would be if the climate deniers working for Chevron were held up as field experts, and that the institution of climate science stood behind them, then anyone who pointed it out was just told we need to organise agriculture on more +4.5 degree compatible terms.
If your argument is “we’d be describing the economy if the economy would be what we described” you’re just demanding reality change to fit the story.