Why Are Economists Frequently Surprised by Government Data?

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snoopies622 said:
Oh, I know. I just said that what you said reminded me of it.

Ok, I get it now. You meant 'fiction' literally as opposed to metaphorically. Cheers.
 
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Can you think of a field of study that has more variables, so few constants, and so many manipulative participants?
 
No. And yet in principle one should be able to apply the scientific method to it, by isolating variables and looking for correlations. Maybe it just needs another few hundred years.
 
snoopies622 said:
No. And yet in principle one should be able to apply the scientific method to it, by isolating variables and looking for correlations. Maybe it just needs another few hundred years.

The scientific method should be applied to health care reform.
 
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skilgannonau said:
...I've stated this in another post, but unless you a see fundamental breakthrough in economics, economics isn't going to have the same predictive power as there is in physics (or even weather science). At best you're going to have approximations.

Wait... Weather science IS physics. The system is quite complex and nonlinear but nevertheless modeled by physical components which obey laws of physics.

Physicists developed finite element models (sometimes 1,000,000 x 1,000,000 matrices) of some of the Space Shuttle Orbiter subsystems to predict dynamic stresses and strains across the structures during ascent (mechanical vibrations). They at least had the advantage of testing the structures on the ground in order to adjust the models to produce the same vibrational resonance frequencies and other modal parameters. And even after all of that pretesting, the predictions of stresses and strains were in error by around 10% for certain modes of vibration, and in error of over 100% at high frequencies.

Just to make the point that even though F = ma is well established, there is no guarantee that the model for a given physical system will be simple. By the way, physicists don't even try to apply closed form solutions to predict interactions between the very complex molecules.