I confess that I sometimes have the wicked and unworthy thought that economists aren’t really economists either.
Dear Dr. Dalrymple,
Your article is excellent, but I have a minor quibble about the above. There’s a serious misconception at the base of most persons’ disdain for economics and its practitioners. Economists are exactly that: economists. What they aren’t is scientists.
Economics is not a “law-like” science. Its predictive powers, while greater than zero, can never embrace the element of time, as the “hard” sciences do. Economists can study trends, incentive structures, and the patterns of history, but due to human variability and the utter impossibility of designing and repeating experiments, they will remain forever incapable of saying when a particular trend will peak or reverse; how great the effect of a particular change in incentives will be; or what aspects of a historical pattern will be repeated, and which ones won’t, when some historically important influence recurs.
For that reason, economists have become very well known for qualifiying their predictions. President Harry Truman once asked a friend, “Do you know any one-handed economists?” The friend was startled, and inquired about Truman’s reasons. Truman replied, “All the economists around here are always saying, ‘on the one hand,’ and ‘on the other hand.’”
It remains the case that, if you were to assemble all the world’s economists and lay them end-to-end, no two would point in the same direction. Yet somehow, we soldier on.
