Can always rely on the news outlets to temper optimism in a world which is bereft of things to be optimistic about.
http://www.economist.com/news/leaders/21710807-or-without-am...
Or even business like consideration for technology that's rapidly dropping in price? Since the election, he's been making promises to coal workers: https://www.technologyreview.com/s/602853/trumps-empty-promi...
On green energy, I'm getting the impression that some threshold is finally being passed where clean energy is picking up momentum, and won't be so easily stopped anymore. Trump may have promised coal to the former coal miners, but coal is getting too expensive, so that's unlikely to happen. On oil, with some luck, he may want to make the US less dependent on Saudi oil.
So despite his denialism, he might turn out to be okay here. Of course you can never be sure with him.
Perhaps when your bona fides aren't so well established as Edsger Dijkstra, randomguy23, you would refrain from doing the same. We all understood what that person meant. Discuss it and move on without resorting to pettiness.
[1] - https://medium.com/@acidflask/this-guys-arrogance-takes-your...
But the problem with economics is that it is often viewed or presented/used (by governments) as a hard science, while it is much closer to some humanities: a game of deducing, abstracting, and guessing.
Economies are hugely complex and intertwined systems, which are hard to understand and harder to predict, because they depend on so many variables.
Economic models often only work when everything is going well or down an established path, and not when you would actually need them.
Economics is not a hard science, and shouldn't be treated as such, but to claim it is more like the humanities is disingenuous. It is a social science. That is to say that it is still ultimately empirical, just that the empirical implications of working with humans makes the job a lot harder and ocassionally less repeatable (are we measuring innate human nature, or a fluid and ever changing culture?).
Economics is called the "dismal science" because of it's "find[ing] the secret of this Universe in 'supply and demand,' and reducing the duty of human governors to that of letting men alone".
Carlyle took a different view, feeling that the "idle Black man in the West Indies" should be "compelled to work as he was fit, and to do the Maker's will who had constructed him".
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_dismal_science
Mencius Moldbug also has an interesting take on Carlyle, suggesting that his views on slavery and hierarchy were significantly more nuanced than what my pithy summary above describes. I have not managed to read enough Carlyle to form my own opinion (maybe on my next 24 hour flight).
https://unqualified-reservations.blogspot.com/2009/07/why-ca... https://unqualified-reservations.blogspot.com/2009/07/carlyl...
Just a guess.