[arethuza]

Do economists look at things like Bretton-Woods from a purely "theoretical" perspective (for lack of a better term) or do they also take into account the political and global power level tensions driving that kind of decision making?

[notahacker]

As a general rule, economists tend to look at theoretical models of how systems are supposed to work and whether those assumptions fit the data and economic historians tend to look at why policies were introduced or recommended and what their proponents and detractors thought about then. They do tend to share departments, students and reading lists though.

[arethuza]

That would appear to be like someone coming up with a theory of the movement of sailing boats without accounting for the weather! :-)

[hedonistbot]

That's economics for you. That's why I switched fields some time ago. It is a "science" that consistently gives flawed predictions and it's is often used to provide cover for political ideologies.

[notahacker]

Or evaluating code without intimate familiarity with the internal politics of the dev team that wrote it :-)