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Comment by ncann | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

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