Eleanor SaittaJun 6
MrAlanCooper

They used to call economics the "dismal science" but for all the wrong reasons.

The real reasons are that economics are A) not a science, and 2) its directives have been consistently, painfully, costly, and dismally wrong.

Jun 3 at 5:49pmWeb
Show threadTedJun 3
@mralancooper I still remember econ classes in college, where I was told people are rational and went, has an economist ever met a person? The response was that people, not a person, are rational overall. I still gave a puzzled look, because we know that is not true either. Eventually I was told, we just assume that to be the case because otherwise we couldn't make any hypothesis at all. They still did not get me to buy into that.
Show threadmike805Jun 3

@hardly_ted @mralancooper Economics is like 18th century bleeding and leeches era medicine. And for the same reason: they do not know how to do controlled experiments. So it's all theorizing.

We do have new means to do controlled economic experiments: multiplayer games and large-scale discrete event simulations. It is well past time to test the competing economics theories and take out the trash.