[ziroshima]

This is an interesting premise, but I don't think it really holds up. The world is absolutely too complex for any of us to understand everything, but this is not a problem. You can abstract everything away to 'black boxes', and there are always a few people that understand what's going on in those 'boxes'.

[dlp211]

Understand is doing a lot of lifting here, it's also probably wrong that all the black boxes are understood. No one actually understands economics, we are all using a bunch of decades/century old models that don't really hold up in the real world and when they don't are dismissed as being influenced by outside factors in a complex system. See raising the minimum wage causes unemployment and inflation is a monetary phenomenon for 2 examples.

[Raidion]

Economics as a concept is a bad example for a black box because what would you say the input and output would be?

Isn't economics the study of all the different black boxes and how they interact in general? Like if you took the honey market, someone out there understands the honey market, who is buying, who is selling, and why the prices are where they are. You repeat this for all markets (or parts of markets) and someone understands either the black box, or the way black boxes usually work together. When you have a large number of black boxes, the system can behave in weird ways because the behavior of the system is defined by each of the sub-systems behaving in a certain range. When that range changes wildly, the system can behave in unpredictable ways.

Economics simply defines general rules for these complicated systems and so are heavily dependent on all the sub systems to function in a prescribed range. I don't feel like you can call economics a black box, but you could say that no one understands those particular problems you put forth because we don't have enough data (and enough correlation) to really determine what that change to a bunch of subsystems has on the system, especially when other factors (bull/bear market, global uncertainty, etc) will probably have a biasing effect.

[jmiskovic]

The issue being raised is that while individual black boxes can be understood, the whole system (interaction between boxes) has become too complex and too fast for human cognition. Automation solves it only for unchanging conditions. Automation could also spiral out out control when only optimization metrics are profit seeking.

[imbnwa]

Like priesthoods?