Home » Posts tagged 'david orrell'

Tag Archives: david orrell

Olduvai
Click on image to purchase

Olduvai III: Catacylsm
Click on image to purchase

Post categories

Post Archives by Category

Storm warnings

April 26, 2018

Storm warnings

Image: Tom Gill, CC BY-NC-ND 2.0

“The test of science is its ability to predict”
— Richard Feynman

As if governed by some deterministic law, the current debates between economists and critics follow a predictable path. Critics begin by mentioning the failure of economists to predict or warn of the crisis. Howard Reed for example recently wrote in Prospect that ‘When the great crash hit a decade ago, the public realised that the economics profession was clueless.’

Thus provoked, economists then reply by pointing out that macroeconomic forecasting is only a small part of what economists do, that their models are based on mathematics and logical consistency, and that it is critics who don’t know what they are talking about – as in the riposte by Diane Coyle, which describes Reed’s piece as ‘lamentable’, a ‘caricature’ and an ‘ill-informed diatribe’ that furthermore ignores existing guidelines on what criticism is ‘good’ and ‘bad’ (the former includes ‘The criticism is by an economist’ which doesn’t seem in the multidisciplinary spirit, and would rule out this piece since I am an applied mathematician).

In a similar debate last year in Times Higher Education, Steve Keen wrote that the global financial crisis caught ‘leading economists and policy bodies completely by surprise. A decade later, economics is a divided and lost discipline.’ Christopher Auld responded that ‘Criticism of economics that relegates the field to … failed “weather” forecasting is not just misguided, it is anti-intellectual and dangerous.’

Over in the Guardian, Larry Elliott wrote that ‘Neoclassical economics has become an unquestioned belief system and treats those challenging the creed as dangerous’. A group of economists from the Institute for Fiscal Studies (IFS) appeared to confirm the latter when they called the article ‘dangerous’ and ‘ill-informed expert bashing … Like most economists, we do not try to forecast the date of the next financial crisis, or any other such event. We are not astrologers, nor priests to the market gods. We analyse data.’

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Olduvai IV: Courage
Click on image to read excerpts

Olduvai II: Exodus
Click on image to purchase

Click on image to purchase @ FriesenPress