Comments on: Why economics has a democratic deficit https://neweconomics.opendemocracy.net/economics-democratic-deficit/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=economics-democratic-deficit Tue, 11 Sep 2018 13:19:15 +0000 hourly 1 https://wordpress.org/?v=5.3.4 By: c1ue https://neweconomics.opendemocracy.net/economics-democratic-deficit/#comment-685 Mon, 23 Oct 2017 17:36:00 +0000 https://www.opendemocracy.net/neweconomics/?p=1651#comment-685 The problems the field of economics have aren’t ones of engagement in the democratic sense.
The problems are, in order of severity:
1) Credibility
Economics as a profession has a credibility rivaled only by chickens pecking at newspapers. The pronouncements made by economic consensus are consistently wrong. Even the extreme cases of boom or bust are consistently not predicted.
2) Independence
Economists are employed by the 1%, large financial institutions and governments. Perhaps the above is a function of this, but there is no question whatsoever that there are very real justifications to power which follow from convenient economic pronouncements. The inability of the economics profession to maintain its integrity and independence under the present system is inarguable.
3) Lack of operational capability
The use of computer models by economic theoreticians is a travesty. Even professional programmers make serious errors all the time – the development of completely ivory tower equations, with no independent methods of validation, by individuals who are known more for economic theory than technical capability – this is a recipe for disaster. Even in cases where credibility and independence are not compromised, the operational capability of creating and maintaining complex computer models is likely nonexistent.

The only tiny ray of hope is the recent award of the (not) Nobel prize for Economics to a behavioral economist. The one area where there is actual independent data on how people and systems actually work vs. work in theory or hope to/should work. And unsurprisingly, the results found by the winner are in great opposition to “mainstream” economic theory.

I will finally add that the “moral” and “economic” illiteracy of voters is a myth. The voters know full well when the fancy economic theories are crap – that’s why we have Trump as President.

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