[sh33mp]

My view for the longest time is that most of mainstream Economics is best seen as "argument by rigorous analogy". The post-Samuelson heavy emphasis on math has allowed for really rigorous analogies, and at least provides a common language for discussing economics rather than wild philosophical/sociological speculation, but in the end analogies are only as good as their original abstraction.

That said it should be noted that there are parts of Economics that do work really well when applied (e.g. certain market mechanisms where profit-maximizing rational agents are a reasonable assumption.)

My biggest concern with Economics is that there is too much money in Economics. Unlike something like Physics or Chemistry, there are too many stakeholders with significant financial resources that have an interest in having the mainstream thought lean one way or another and the big Economic systems are too complex for "wrong" theories to be definitively "debunked". I'm not insinuating any academic misconduct, but what is considered successful/fruitful/popularized research is surely affected by money, in terms of funding departments, funding research, or well-financed employment at various institutions. Think taxes, financial regulation, discretionary monetary/fiscal policy, and so on. You will probably find that the "boring" parts of Economics like education, food and transport to be relatively level-headed. My advice for anyone interested in any Economic theory is to ask of any claim 1) Who are the stakeholders, who stands to gain? 2) How easily is the claim falsifiable?

And of course always remember the Gell-Mann Amnesia effect.

[wallace_f]

>You will probably find that the "boring" parts of Economics like education, food and transport to be relatively level-headed. My advice for anyone interested in any Economic theory is to ask of any claim 1) Who are the stakeholders, who stands to gain? 2) How easily is the claim falsifiable? And of course always remember the Gell-Mann Amnesia effect.

Yea, I think that is good advice.

I would just say those fields you listed are good, but maybe not best examples: something like Management Science/Applied Maths has a lot of useful, yet very boring, techniques for business, such as linear optimization. Education, food and even transport also has politics.

The economic "science" circling around the Fed is one day going to be seen as more egregious offense than the Nobel Prize given for the lobotomy procedure.