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Comment by bensyverson | Hacker News Reader

> Economists aren’t naive, so they don’t really believe these things entirely. But they assume they are mostly correct over the medium to long term.

Spoiler alert from the article: turns out economists are wrong. This will sound inflammatory, but has the field of Economics produced anything of value to society? It seems to be a social "science" based on incorrect generalizations about human psychology and studies that don't replicate. At the end of his long career, Alan Greenspan (their Michael Jordan) basically said "whoops, I was wrong that people would behave rationally."

What does humanity get from the field of economics that justifies the amount of attention and status we give economists?

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Do you think there's any value in trying to understand how human societies work at scale?

I do. Do we think economists are actually generating this understanding? I'd be curious to know about policy changes which have been the result of non-obvious insights from the field of economics.

I think it's one of our better attempts to understand a very large complex system! I think it's inherently very hard to do. I do think you can critique a lot of things about the field and ideology, and so on, but I don't think that's an inherent problem of economics.

> non-obvious

I'd maybe question this a bit. I suspect that many things we consider obvious are only so because of the field of economics -- but that's admittedly only an initial hunch.

I mean, economics is a study in self modifying systems that change based upon what you learn about them. Much like chaos theory wasn't something we innately understand, the same is true for economics.

Hence economics is a probabilistic field. The things that occur have a probability behind them. Instead of a policy that needs X to happen the policy can be adapted to "If A then B, if X then Y".

Have you heard how FCC spectrum auctions work?

The value is mostly in succeeding and communicating the mechanism. There's very little value in merely trying to understand.

But I think economists did pretty well: supply and demand, marginalism, opportunity cost, Coase theorem... Not physics-level well but well.

I think macro economics has provided significant value to society even if the model isn't precise with perfect predictions. We do have worthwhile models that the government can use to avoid making serious monetary mistakes in the face of the real business cycle. We are unlikely to trigger the awful depths of the great depression again.

The main problem I see with public economists is Goodharts law: When the predictive model becomes visible to the agents in the economy, there are stable strategies to counteract those models. So if economists want to remain good predictors of real outcomes, they have to collect massive amounts of data to feed the model but then remain mostly invisible afterward, so that the agents being analyzed don't change behavior too much.

In some sense, a known bad model that is used to set central policy may be good because the rest of the economic agents can work on a diversity of better models without correlating as much with each other and the known central model.

Economy is at the stage where medecine was in the 18th century. It's more of an alchemy than a science.

Insert "always was" meme here.

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