Comment by pembrook | Hacker News Reader

Comment by pembrook | Hacker News Reader

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Economics is not pseudoscience. Pseudoscience is essential oils being marketed as medicine.

Economics is a social science, just like anthropology, archaeology, history, linguistics, political science, psychology, sociology, etc. etc.

It's never going to be something with Laws of Gravity or the like, because humans are never wholly predictable or rational creatures. But that doesn't mean we can't come up with models that explain markets a majority of the time, in a macro sense.

Why do you think central bank policy has been able to prevent a depression from occurring over the last 90 years, when in the past they were a regular occurrence? That's economics in action. Just because it lacks the certainty of computer science doesn't mean you can throw out the baby with the bath water.

>Economics is a social science, just like anthropology, archaeology, history, linguistics

Unlike those sciences there's a lot of money in economics invested in certain conclusions, though.

It does not help Walmart's bottom line, for instance, if everybody stops believing that raising the minimum wage causes unemployment.

There aren't equivalent controversies with money behind them like in other social sciences (and other social sciences don't get paid as much).

We've avoided a major depression so far, but our institutional knowledge only spans a couple generations. There are very few people left who lived through the Great Depression. That there is active debate regarding policies that will prevent future depressions is not encouraging. Those who learn history are cursed to watch as history repeats.

> Why do you think central bank policy has been able to prevent a depression from occurring over the last 90 years, when in the past they were a regular occurrence?

There is a strong school of thought that argues that central bank policy has created _more_ and _worse_ depressions than before.

The fact that we can now debate if a central bank is a good thing or a bad thing is evidence that it's all pseudoscience.

People debate whether or not global warming is happening (or whether its man made). Does that mean the field behind global warming research a pseudoscience (by your definition)?

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