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Comment by throwaway59553 | Hacker News Reader

Why are "economists" taken seriously when they add absolutely nothing of value and are consistently wrong?

A notable example: Krugman.

"Please don't post shallow dismissals, especially of other people's work. A good critical comment teaches us something."

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

You should actually read up on some of the work of some of these prize winning economists - lots of them actually have very insightful and useful contributions to society.

I cannot recommend enough the book "Who Gets What and Why" by Alvin Roth, a former Nobel Prize winner. Among other things, he created the world's first successful Kidney exchange program for donors. The book eloquently lays out how to design functional markets of exchange when money is not a resource available.

His work is easy to understand, eloquent, and literally saves lives. This is exactly the kind of thing worth celebrating.

You expressed your opinion in a rather rugged way but I think many people share the same general sentiment, in that unlike physics or chemistry, economic and literature works are highly subjective and are often source of endless bickering.

I think you should do a little research on the contributions of some of the Nobel laureates in economics. They have used novel economic theory to reduce world hunger, reduce childhood mortality by increasing vaccination rates, come up with clever methods to allocate public goods like the frequency spectrum and that's just the last 3 years.

The reason why I put economists in quoatation mark it's precisely because most modern economists, that lean to any school, hammer their models to fit their theories, and have pretty much no practical value when you try to apply that in a real scenario with infinite variables. Unlike the hard sciences you mentioned, where every theory and model is subjected to intense scrutiny.

Meanwhile, real economists, with a proven track record: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_School_(economics)

Economists in the public sphere are a fraction of practising economists and are often bought and paid for to push narratives. Or, as you said, hammer their models to fit their theories.

Economics as a field though does create good models and predictions, but most of those are in the private sector, where money matters and weeds out faulty models.

“The ideas of economists and political philosophers, both when they are right and when they are wrong, are more powerful than is commonly understood. Indeed the world is ruled by little else.

Practical men, who believe themselves to be quite exempt from any intellectual influences, are usually the slaves of some defunct economist. Madmen in authority, who hear voices in the air, are distilling their frenzy from some academic scribbler of a few years back.” — J M Keynes

http://www.equitablegrowth.org/the-general-theory-of-employm...

I agree that economists have a lot of value as political philosophers. But that's largely not how economics operates nowadays, the field is mostly trying to operate as a hard science.

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