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Comment by pleasecalllater | Hacker News Reader

I think they just don't understand almost anything.

I have a real problem with the economists. Take four professors of economics into a room and ask a simple question. A question like "is this a good thing for X to implement Y", like "is this good for the Great Britain to exit the EU" or "is this a good thing to increase taxes for the rich".

Just ask - you will get at least 5 different answers to every question. Those answers will usually exclude each other.

So now me: I listen to those professors and who's right? I'm sure some of them are not. Some of them are simply saying the truth, some are lying.

And now take just one professor - ask him/her something - you will get answers. How should I know that they are right? I simply cannot. I simply don't believe them.

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> Take four professors of economics into a room and ask a simple question. A question like "is this a good thing for X to implement Y", like "is this good for the Great Britain to exit the EU" or "is this a good thing to increase taxes for the rich".

Just ask - you will get at least 5 different answers to every question. Those answers will usually exclude each other.

Have you actually done this? Survey results from people who have done this (such as [1]) suggest that economists frequently do come to a majority consensus.

Furthermore, if you ask a group of software engineers how to design or implement complex software. you'll find many conflicting suggestions about which languages, libraries, programming models, databases, etc to use. Does that mean none of them know what they're doing, or does it suggest that complex systems don't have simple, straightforward solutions?

I'd like to gently suggest that you might not know as much about economists and what they know as you think you do.

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1. https://people.uwec.edu/jamelsem/fte/fte/efl/teacher_stuff/a...

I like your point about software engineers. Economics, like software engineering, is a dynamic field where knowledge advances at an irregular pace.

IGM Economics Experts Panel is interesting to read example of an expert survey. Economists also self-report their confidence and how strongly they agree with a statement.

http://www.igmchicago.org/surveys/trade-disruptions

There certainly are consistent answers in economics. But they tend to read more like safety rules than active policy measures. E.G. Regulatory price fixing below market rates will create shortages. The runaway printing of money will simply cause the value of money to fall relative to commodities (inflation).

Questions such as "What is leaving the EU going to cost the UK economy?" Or "When will we have the next recession and what will cause it?" Are much more nuanced questions. Mostly because markets are predictive, and any new information is immediately incorporated into those predictions. It is like asking "what sort of software failure is going to cause the next major computer breach?" If we knew the answer, we would fix it and our prediction would be immediately invalidated. Computer experts were predicting the rise of cryptolocker variants when Heartbleed & Shellshock happened. Then you had everyone auditing all their OSS stacks, when out of left field we get big news from Intel on Meltdown/Spectre.

There is no clear right or wrong in economics. A society must define goals and then economic policy can help achieve them.

Things like income distribution, freedom of markets and others are value judgements. You first have to agree on these before you can ask an economist.

This is not physics where nature decides what's right or wrong.

> Just ask - you will get at least 5 different answers to every question.

That's because you asked a normative rather than a descriptive question.

Admittedly, econ is a field where there can also be a problem with descriptive questions, but blaming the field of economics for the fact that normative questions involve subjective value judgements and every person has a different framework for making those is quite unfair.

Your impression comes from the media's tendency to try and present "both sides" of a story. So when reporting on an issue that 99% of professors are one side, they'll select one of the 1% and one of the 99% to give interviews.

Well, that's possible that you're right.

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