What Good Are Economists Anyway?

{ 4 comments }

Shag from Brookline April 19, 2009 at 3:38 pm: In horseshoes, close enough wins. If that were the case for economists, which of them would be winners?
Mike Nelson April 20, 2009 at 10:31 am: I’m reminded of Tetlock’s book, Expert Political Judgment:
http://press.princeton.edu/titles/7959.html
His most famous finding is that experts often get things wrong. But a more careful read demonstrates that some can get it very right.
Doug Hess April 20, 2009 at 1:49 pm: Seems some economists saw some of this coming; at least some econ policy folks at liberal/left think tanks were warning about the dangers of the housing bubble for years.

Of course, would it be fair to ask how many political analysts saw the collapse of the USSR or other similar major political events?

Do we cherry pick those things that surprise us when asking these kinds of questions? Maybe we predict somethings well but have (i) forgotten what planning was was like before we had social science, but also (ii) become over confident in our ability to predict and extend ourselves too far.
Thomas April 21, 2009 at 12:24 pm: Isn’t the purpose of social science to generate reliable predictions, i.e., expectations that carry some uncertainty but allow us to exclude their converse with a reasonable degree of confidence?

Consequently, the issue isn’t whether some economists predicted the crisis (because of course some would), but that we had no good reason to disbelieve predictions of no crisis made by others.

That is, our knowledge is insufficient to allow us to know, ex ante, to whom we should listen.