{"id":33758,"date":"2018-04-26T06:31:44","date_gmt":"2018-04-26T11:31:44","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/olduvai.ca\/?p=33758"},"modified":"2018-04-26T06:31:44","modified_gmt":"2018-04-26T11:31:44","slug":"storm-warnings","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/?p=33758","title":{"rendered":"Storm warnings"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Storm warnings<\/a><\/h3>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n
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Image: Tom Gill, CC BY-NC-ND 2.0<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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\u201cThe test of science is its ability to predict\u201d
\n<\/em>\u2014 Richard Feynman<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

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<\/a> in Prospect that \u2018When the great crash hit a decade ago, the public realised that the economics profession was clueless.\u2019<\/p>\n

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\u2019t know what they are talking about \u2013 as in the riposte<\/a> by Diane Coyle, which describes Reed\u2019s piece as \u2018lamentable\u2019, a \u2018caricature\u2019 and an \u2018ill-informed diatribe\u2019 that furthermore ignores existing guidelines on what criticism is \u2018good\u2019 and \u2018bad\u2019 (the former<\/a> includes \u2018The criticism is by an economist\u2019 which doesn\u2019t seem in the multidisciplinary spirit, and would rule out this piece since I am an applied mathematician).<\/p>\n

In a similar debate<\/a> last year in Times Higher Education, Steve Keen wrote that the global financial crisis caught \u2018leading economists and policy bodies completely by surprise. A decade later, economics is a divided and lost discipline.\u2019 Christopher Auld responded that \u2018Criticism of economics that relegates the field to \u2026 failed \u201cweather\u201d forecasting is not just misguided, it is anti-intellectual and dangerous.\u2019<\/p>\n

Over in the Guardian, Larry Elliott wrote<\/a> that \u2018Neoclassical economics has become an unquestioned belief system and treats those challenging the creed as dangerous\u2019. A group of economists from the Institute for Fiscal Studies (IFS) appeared to confirm the latter when they called<\/a> the article \u2018dangerous\u2019 and \u2018ill-informed expert bashing \u2026 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.\u2019<\/p>\n

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…<\/p>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Storm warnings Image: Tom Gill, CC BY-NC-ND 2.0 \u201cThe test of science is its ability to predict\u201d \u2014 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 […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[181,19934,10696,637,10693,705],"class_list":["post-33758","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-economics","tag-crisis","tag-david-orrell","tag-open-democracy","tag-politics","tag-prediction","tag-science"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/33758","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=33758"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/33758\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":33759,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/33758\/revisions\/33759"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=33758"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=33758"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=33758"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}