Re: One could ask the same about climatology.
Posted by Amaranth Rose on Mar 08, 2002 at 16:05
(65.172.150.176)Re: One could ask the same about climatology. (bobbapink)
Does Economics have controlled experimental system paradigms with dependent and independent variables that are controlled and manipulated, whose effects are observed and reported? Does Economics consistently produce hypotheses about systems, which are then carefully tested and observed and measured? Do Economists concern themselves with reproducibility of experimental results? Do Economists test their hypotheses on small groups of people and then are they able to generalize from this small-group paradigm to predict accurately how large groups of people will behave?
Animal Behaviorists can do those things. Can an Economist predict with any degree of assuredness what effect on the economy will be of a rise in the prime interest rate, or a decrease in whatever rate the federal government wants to change? Can it predict the effect on my community? Yours? Staten Island? Every time I hear someone talk about a change in this, that or the other marker in the economic program, they ALWAYS say "IT iS HOPED THAT..." or words to that effect. And sometimes it works, and sometimes it doesn't. It's no better than voodoo, apparently. I listen to Louis Rukheyser (sp?) sometimes. It's amazing what the government does, based on what the "Economists" tell them, and how it ends up. It's plumb spooky.