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]]>While I agree with everything you have said I just had to pick up on this line:
“But we are not soothsayers”
I think this is interesting. While we often try to avoid being a discipline that is solely focused on answers it seems that the common conception of economists, even inside the discipline, is of a subject that aims to predict outcomes.
After all, Friedman’s empirical positivist point of view stated that the main way to evaluate economics is based on the success of it to predict the future, not the realism of our assumptions (a point of view I find difficult to relate to standard positivism 😛 ). If Friedman was happy to say these kind of things, I can understand why the general public views us as a set of soothsayers – infact that is what my flatmate called economists last night when I was talking to him.
I agree that a large section of economics, infact potentially all of economic science is focused on human behaviour rather than predictive accuracy. However, there are economists out there whose goal is predictive accuracy and reading the tea leaves of the world economy – maybe we need to come up with a different name for this discipline 😛
]]>We get a lot of shtick from people who think that the raison d’etre of economists is to provide the answers. What’s happening to the currency? Are interest rates going up? If we we cut taxes, will we be better off? etc. etc. We can point to things that the models in our mind lead to. But we are not soothsayers. After all, we are social scientists – not lab scientists. We try to improve our understanding of human behaviour. If economics had perfected this, we wouldn’t even be needed.
All too often people will use the inexactness of economics as a reason to ignore it. It is just as intellectually dishonest to say that GDP misses out on other measures of social develpment and therefore anyone who wants GDP growth is a minion of the VRWC.
]]>“But everything else is not equal.”
Definitely. I just didn’t want to get into that rather hairy topic in this post so I went for the most uncontroversial statement I could think of about growth 😛
Thanks for the link, too. Self-promotion seems to be the norm on the internet so I think you’re being awfully polite by apologising for linking to something thoughtful 🙂
]]>Anyhow, rant aside, you wrote: “All other things being equal, growth in GDP/capita will be good for everyone.” But everything else is not equal. For what it’s worth (and sorry for linking to myself) I had a go at looking at the pros and cons of economic growth as a measure wellbeing here:
http://laanta.blogspot.com/2007/05/all-we-need-is-growth.html