What do Economists Know?

I follow several economists and from time to time really wonder what they know. In a recent piece one states:

...A more extensive social safety net can reduce the risk of attempts at entrepreneurship. If there is an extensive social safety net to fall back upon if things don't work out, you might be more willing to quit the job you hate (the one with health insurance for the kids) and sink everything you have into a small business that you've always wanted to run. But I'm not sure the data above support this interpretation, i.e. that there is an obvious positive association between the strength of social insurance and the prevalence of small business. But it is highly suggestive, and regressions that control for other cross-country differences could help to settle the issue.

The argument is that a "safety net" helps create more entrepreneurs.  Nonsense. Recently I saw an erstwhile self proclaimed entrepreneur take a two month maternity leave, he was the father! If you run a business, you abandon all and do nothing but the business. We naturally abandoned this wannabe.

An entrepreneur takes a chance, they leave everything and pursue their dream, there is no alternative, no safety net, they must feel invincible. This statement of the above type are based upon a wish of what some economist dreams should be the case.

In one of my companies, I had a passport, my credit card, and nothing else. I traveled to over twenty countries convincing people I had never met of why my idea was of interest. There was no net, in fact there was substantial risk. It was my money, my time, my life.

Thus this nonsense is spreading and now we see a multiple of opportunities where we see what we call the "Shark Tank" generation, a loud mouth and maybe a good idea but that is all. Worse yet, we now have economists in the fray...did they not do enough harm in the bailout, in Russia, in Healthcare?