But the key to acting is that there was training based upon facts. Archimedes and his principle let the captain determine if the ship could keep afloat, Newton and his ballistics allowed for the determination of the accuracy of shells, and Marconi and his radio along with Maxwell and his waves allowed for communications. These men built the act mode on facts, predictable facts. There does not appear to be a single macroeconomist who has built anything on facts of any sort.
Thus in reading the blog entry by Sumner today I was reminded of that battle. Economists appear to think too much, have no foundation for there models and argue about acting. In control theory and practice one can design a control system which can adapt to any strange set of circumstances. That is to try something, measure the result and then try again. These adaptive control systems really work.
However as seen in the Sumner entry there is much too much thought and little if any action. There is no theory or basis for action and one economists takes shots at another. It is worse than the religious wars of early Christendom over the nature of Christ! Perhaps that is why we are in this mess. The bankers act without thought and the economists think without action. Try that for a stable system. LTCM redux.
The above observation regarding the paucity of fact based reasoning in economics was brought home by a west coast macroeconomist of late. He states:
One of the dirty secrets of economics is that there is no such thing as “economic theory.” There is simply no set of bedrock principles on which one can base calculations that illuminate real-world economic outcomes. We should bear in mind this constraint on economic knowledge as the global drive for fiscal austerity shifts into top gear.
Unlike economists, biologists, for example, know that every cell functions according to instructions for protein synthesis encoded in its DNA. Chemists begin with what the Heisenberg and Pauli principles, plus the three-dimensionality of space, tell us about stable electron configurations. Physicists start with the four fundamental forces of nature.
Economists have none of that. The “economic principles” underpinning their theories are a fraud – not fundamental truths but mere knobs that are twiddled and tuned so that the “right” conclusions come out of the analysis.
The “right” conclusions depend on which of two types of economist you are. One type chooses, for non-economic and non-scientific reasons, a political stance and a set of political allies, and twiddles and tunes his or her assumptions until they yield conclusions that fit their stance and please their allies. The other type takes the carcass of history, throws it into the pot, turns up the heat, and boils it down, hoping that the bones will yield lessons and suggest principles to guide our civilization’s voters, bureaucrats, and politicians as they slouch toward utopia.
Can one imagine a "science" which has no basis in fact! And these people are trying to control our economy. Yes, the one type uses their political views to project their economic analysis. In what other field of endeavor would that be allowed. The law has the law, medicine has dead bodies, engineering has broken machines, and then they all try to fix them. There are principles. Economics has no principles. Would you trust so unprincipled a group?
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