{"id":35129,"date":"2018-06-16T06:46:50","date_gmt":"2018-06-16T11:46:50","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/olduvai.ca\/?p=35129"},"modified":"2018-06-16T06:46:50","modified_gmt":"2018-06-16T11:46:50","slug":"economics-is-not-rocket-science-its-even-more-complicated","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/?p=35129","title":{"rendered":"Economics Is Not Rocket Science \u2014 It&#8217;s Even More Complicated"},"content":{"rendered":"<h3 class=\"page-title\"><a href=\"https:\/\/mises.org\/wire\/economics-not-rocket-science-\u2014-its-even-more-complicated\">Economics Is Not Rocket Science \u2014 It&#8217;s Even More Complicated<\/a><\/h3>\n<h2 class=\"page-title\"><img decoding=\"async\" style=\"color: #333333; font-size: 16px;\" draggable=\"false\" src=\"https:\/\/mises.org\/sites\/default\/files\/styles\/slideshow\/public\/static-page\/img\/rocket.JPG?itok=F_fuUdpW\" alt=\"rocket.JPG\" \/><\/h2>\n<div id=\"slideshow\" class=\"group-image-wrapper field-group-html-element pull-left\"><\/div>\n<div class=\"body-content clearfix\">\n<p>Over the years, I have heard multiple different things described as \u201cnot rocket science.\u201d The implication was always that rocket science was just about the hardest thing to do, making virtually everything else easy by comparison. As an economics professor over many of those years, I have increasingly come to object to that characterization. I think the questions of social coordination that economics addresses may not require \u201crocket science,\u201d but are in many ways much more complex and difficult, especially when it comes to imposing control. After all, we have successfully sent rockets to many places in our planetary neighborhood, demonstrating a tolerable ability to solve enough of the relevant problems, yet economic policies remain known for causing more harm than help. As Peter Boettke once led off a post, \u201cPolitical economy ain\u2019t rocket science. But it is a discipline that forces one to focus on ideas and the implementation of ideas in public policies.\u201d And the more one tries to control, the more those ideas and implementation issues stack up against the possibility, much less the probability, of effectiveness.<\/p>\n<p>In one important sense, rocket science is simply vector addition of the relevant forces. And the relevant relationships for generating rockets\u2019 thrust are governed by physical laws and relationships that are stable and mathematically expressible. That is why one website deviated from rocket science orthodoxy, under the title \u201cRocket science is easy; rocket engineering is hard.\u201d The problem is one of accurately measuring the needed information and controlling the relevant forces\u2014that is, engineering things (often with millions of parts) so that they work as intended.<\/p>\n<p>\u2026click on the above link to read the rest of the article\u2026<\/p>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Economics Is Not Rocket Science \u2014 It&#8217;s Even More Complicated Over the years, I have heard multiple different things described as \u201cnot rocket science.\u201d The implication was always that rocket science was just about the hardest thing to do, making virtually everything else easy by comparison. As an economics professor over many of those years, [&hellip;]<\/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":[15083,7617,20528,20527,705,735],"class_list":["post-35129","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-economics","tag-gary-galles","tag-mises-institute","tag-physical-science","tag-rocket-science","tag-science","tag-social-science"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/35129","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=35129"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/35129\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":35130,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/35129\/revisions\/35130"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=35129"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=35129"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=35129"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}