> So here's the question: do you have a falsifiable, demonstrably better model than one of those used in mainstream economics? If so, you can simply show it to us.
Yes. My model is:
Care about full employment more.
Free trade can have benefits but without a plan it causes permanent generational harm.
Purposefully exporting your industrial base to another country will risk societal collapse.
Supply chains are fragile.
And so on. This may seem facile but it would be loads better than the current mainstream economics models. Have you actually seen any of the current models? Do you think that working up some sort of IS/LM analysis is going to lead to better outcomes? Do you think that more partial differential equations are helping somehow?
The entire fucking premise of the thing is fucked. I wrote my economics thesis on it. I don't feel like writing a long essay here but I'll tell a small story that maybe will illustrate the concept:
Ask yourself how you'd apply the concept of rational expectations or the efficient market hypothesis to the simple game of chess. Would it be a useful analysis to put two players on opposite sides of the table and say "each agent will maximize their utility and engage in actions that are understandable as rational".
I mean you could say that but what the fuck would you even mean? What is the rational next step for a participant in a game of chess? It's taken us generations of computing power to even sort of get a handle on this, and we're talking about a completely bounded game with 64 squares and 16 players on each side. Yet despite the fundamental simplicity of the system we still have a possibility space that resists analysis and is certainly not one where a normal person could optimize their strategy in any meaningful way.
But then we shift to an unbounded competitive game with billions of participants and think there's such a thing as a rational utility optimizing strategy that agents can discern and follow? GTFO. It's a nonsensical argument.
The fact is that economic systems are complex adaptive systems that display properties of chaotic behavior, non-linear responses to inputs, sensitive dependence on initial conditions, and lock-in effects.
Someone might come along and point out that actually modern economics models do take that stuff into account and there's all sorts of people working in that context, that we've handed out Nobel prizes for research on asymmetric information decision making and all that.
Cool. And yeah the people who get the premise I'm getting at, which is that neoclassical models are fucking useless at any kind of policy level, will probably be the ones that salvage economics, if in fact it's a thing that can be salvaged.
But in the meantime, I disagree with your premise. Sometimes it's better to know you don't know anything than to use your beautiful and wrong model to override people that would otherwise be making common sense decisions, like maybe we shouldn't implement austerity measures because people will die if we do.