For one thing, it's kind of like saying "if scientists really understood the weather, we wouldn't have tornados every few years". Or even better, "if we really understood climate change, we'd stop it". There's a big difference between understanding something and being able to do something about it.
Another thing, it's missing the nuance that financial crises could be handled better or worse, and it seems to me like it's getting better (e.g. compare the great depression to the great recession).
People like to dump on things they don't have much familiarity with, and software engineers and the HN crowd in general seems to think everything besides software is all noise full of uneducated people. (Not saying you specifically are an outsider to economics or a software engineer, but that is the general trend.)
I would even go so far as to say economics also explains quite well why usually nothing substantial is done to prevent them.
More information: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EwB5ihGu4Jw
Here's the quote: https://www.cnbc.com/2018/05/18/warren-buffett-explains-why-...
> Kenneth Cordele Griffin is an American hedge fund manager, entrepreneur and investor. He is the founder, chief executive officer, co-chief investment officer, and 80% owner of Citadel LLC, a multinational hedge fund. He also owns Citadel Securities, one of the largest market makers in the U.S.
I don’t see economist anywhere in Ken’s Wikipedia.
Just saying it doesn't count is a bit weak because that is saying training in a certain discipline and graduating in it has no meaning or skill transfer of relevance.
But I guess your point is to make sure that economists don't have any successes, not some deeper introspection into whether the study of economics can help in being successful.
Paul McCulley (an economist) made certain predictions while working at PIMCO (as did Paul Krugman), and then he left and Bill Gross (PIMCO founder) ignored what he said and made certain financial moves and lost a whole bunch of money:
* https://www.businessinsider.com/this-was-the-bill-gross-blun...
* https://www.nytimes.com/2014/10/03/opinion/paul-krugman-depr...
Gross is way richer than McCulley (or Krugman), and yet the rich guys got it wrong and the poor(er) guys got it right. If only Gross had listened to the economists (that worked for him).
“If biologists were so good at their science, they’d all be extremely healthy”?
“If sociologists could predict what humans think, they’d have a job”? In fact competent sociologists do, and generally in marketing departments. Same for economists.
One reason is that we can now better simulate the rational actors in a market.
The rational choice for food would not lead to an obesity and diabetes epidemic in the wealthiest country. Something doesn't add up.
Let's try again. Can you give sources showing that AI effectively models the economic decisions of non-rational actors? Anyone who can predict the economy should be able to quickly become very wealthy.
There was a physicist (Feynman?) who once joked that his job would have been much harder if particles had free will.
But there are regular experiments that are run in the realm of economics and various models make different predictions. It turns out that tax cuts don't pay for themselves, as some say:
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kansas_experiment
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tax_Cuts_and_Jobs_Act
Turns out QE wouldn't devalue the currency and cause hyperinflation (as some said it would):
> We believe the Federal Reserve's large-scale asset purchase plan (so-called "quantitative easing") should be reconsidered and discontinued. We do not believe such a plan is necessary or advisable under current circumstances. The planned asset purchases risk currency debasement and inflation, and we do not think they will achieve the Fed's objective of promoting employment.
* https://manhattan.institute/article/an-open-letter-to-ben-be...
Turns out that austerity is not expansionary (i.e., cutting government demand/spending does not grow the economy; see Chart 2):
* https://www.theguardian.com/business/ng-interactive/2015/apr...
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Austerity:_The_History_of_a_Da...
There are certainly areas where things can get complicated and there's room for debate, but in other areas the mechanisms are understood.
Just because some folks choose to go with ideology over accurate models does not mean we don't have accurate models: is it the fault of medicine that some people say vaccines and masks don't work for ideological reasons?
Austerity to the point of being able to pay down government debt is painful, that’s well known. Unchecked spending and unlimited growth in debt is however unsustainable.
Also this usually works short-term because companies and people still have the infrastructure from previous government spending.
When that infrastructure inevitably crumbles because the taxes don't suffice to support it 10 years down the road, it's too late, the infrastructure needed to create new businesses will be missing, leading to a downward spiral for the economy.
It's not so much that the idea was simplified to push a political agenda: Arthur Laffer himself, when popularizing the concept (with the eponymous Laffer Curve[1]), used it as an argument against tax raise in the US.
So the big problem with economics is not so much that its results are being hijacked by politicians to push their agenda, it's that most of them (at least most of the prominent ones) are in fact pushing their ideologies through their publications.
“The basic concept was not new; Laffer himself notes antecedents in the writings of the 14th-century social philosopher Ibn Khaldun and others.”
IMO, it’s says less about economics than it does democracy. You can find many “think tanks” which are paid to create papers in support various ideologies. This doesn’t guarantee what they are saying is incorrect, but it does many they gloss over any inconvenient caveats.
Also, I’m assuming it’s unlikely the government has set the tax rate at the optimal rate to maximise revenue. But this assumption is probably dubious because even without explicit knowledge of the curve governments are probably pushed towards the optimal rate.