One random good prediction proves nothing, unfortunately. I tend to believe that Ricardo's comparative advantage and similar economic principles established for more than 150 years are solid enough to be relied upon when dealing with a relatively large markets; I'd go with HilbertSpace about the global macroeconomic BS, however. I'm pretty sure that global markets are too complex to be described by any current model.
One point that particularly saddens me is the utter misunderstanding of growth by economists, because they go with the easy assumption first (GDP growth is a representative value), then with the oversimplification about the sources of growth, particularly the salient dependency of available cheap energy to sustain growth (see for instance http://netenergy.theoildrum.com/node/7069#more ).
Then they generally proceed by forgetting that Adam Smith wrote his books in a time of immemorial non existent or extremely slow growth, which change radically the view. Market efficiency is to be considered in a radically different manner when the general environment is economically quite stable, which naturally should prevent concentration, for instance.
This is just to mention a couple of things that struck me, I generally don't pretend to know much about economy, though.
One random good prediction proves nothing, unfortunately. I tend to believe that Ricardo's comparative advantage and similar economic principles established for more than 150 years are solid enough to be relied upon when dealing with a relatively large markets; I'd go with HilbertSpace about the global macroeconomic BS, however. I'm pretty sure that global markets are too complex to be described by any current model.
I think one of the epistemological problem with economics is that it's almost impossible to run experiments(except maybe college kids experiments), and it would probably be irresponsible to run experiments on whole nations. That why some economists approach it by using entirely deductive logic as a mean of study.
> I think one of the epistemological problem with economics is that it's almost impossible to run experiments[...]
It's also true of cosmology, though cosmological errors won't ruin people lives :) If you haven't read "the shock doctrine", it states that actually there was many economic experiments, in Chile and other countries, usually for the worse... Well USSR made some large scale experiments too, from 1917 to 1921, then 1921 to 1927.
One point that particularly saddens me is the utter misunderstanding of growth by economists, because they go with the easy assumption first (GDP growth is a representative value), then with the oversimplification about the sources of growth, particularly the salient dependency of available cheap energy to sustain growth (see for instance http://netenergy.theoildrum.com/node/7069#more ).
Then they generally proceed by forgetting that Adam Smith wrote his books in a time of immemorial non existent or extremely slow growth, which change radically the view. Market efficiency is to be considered in a radically different manner when the general environment is economically quite stable, which naturally should prevent concentration, for instance.
This is just to mention a couple of things that struck me, I generally don't pretend to know much about economy, though.