Monday, October 14, 2013
Economics closed, mofo.
Economics is supposed to be a science. The job of a science is to gather and analyze facts and construct theories. We justify paying people to do science because good theories (like Newton's laws or Ohm's law) can help us make things and prepare for the future.
Robert Shiller is an economist. We know this because he just received a Nobel Prize for economics. NPR Marketplace just now played a quote from Robert Shiller about the probability of federal default.
"It'll probably be OK, but I can't predict the future."
Today is Monday. He's talking about Thursday. He can't predict Thursday from Monday.
Therefore: Economics is NOT a science and all of its practitioners should be disbarred and ignored, just as we ignore astrologers. Closed, mofo.
QED. Of course we already knew this, but it's ever so nice to have a perfect disproof directly from the horse's ass.
Compare: How would real sciences handle a three-day prediction?
Meteorology: Thursday will be dry and cool. Low 35, high 60.
Botany: By Thursday, the deciduous trees will have dropped 40% of their leaves.
Both of those scientists are dealing with VASTLY more complex systems than the federal default. Each system has an exactly infinite number of variables, while federal default depends on exactly three bizarre Satanic pseudo-human thingamajigs (Reid, Boehner, Obama) whose behavior in nearly identical circumstances is known from previous years.
¶ 4:16 PM 
