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by nickserv 1171 days ago
Right, but it's still possible to understand and debug incredibly complex programs, in the end it's still deterministic.

The problem with economics is that it's a social science, and that humans are non deterministic in their behavior. Not even seasoned economists can predict an outcome, the best they can do is understand what happened after the fact.

1 comments

Separate to the "(non)-deterministic" question which would detract from this discussion.

One part we also fail to consider is that there is a feedback loop between all the individuals in society and any large economic levers that get pulled. This along with all the complicated interactions that are a result of the specific imperfect set of information each individual has makes this problem next to impossible to fully model. At best we could have approximations and models that abstract that complexity away. We approach something similar to the N-body problem in physics, which on some level I'd argue is simpler even as we have specific equations government their behavior. Not so the case for humans and their "internal" decision making process.