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Comment by hnbad | Hacker News Reader

That paper's misnomer aside, you probably don't want to listen to economists to learn how economies work. The soft sciences tend to get a bad rep but economists tend to be the ones most resembling ideological fan fiction.

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This is playing out currently, quite openly, as the FTC investigates whether companies have raised prices more than costs have risen from inflation. It's becoming increasingly clear that the academic economic consensus is, simply, disconnected from how markets actually operate. For instance, while each day has brought a new study of consolidated companies engaging in pandemic price gouging, academic establishment luminaries like Larry Summers continue to argue that antitrust is unrelated to inflation.

We're in a true "Emperor's new clothes" moment.

Larry Summers was 100% right about impending inflation. He’s been totally vindicated. I’m suspicious of where you are getting your information and suspect it’s politically motivated.

Actually he was a third right: https://www.newyorker.com/news/our-columnists/is-larry-summe...

Larry Summers has been wrong numerous other times and this is pure confirmation by settling on one where he hasn't been. Broadly this is the basis for macroeconomics jumping from one "analyst" to another with the benefit of hindsight. Just look at how many diff predictors for recessions there are - the yield curve was supposed to be the best one. When a recession does occur, economists will prove to the one that was correlated to predict the next one.

It’s quite the opposite. Economics is generally the most rigorous of the social sciences.

Even the “worst” discipline, macroeconomics, tends to yield high quality predictions. Larry Summers was screaming from the rooftop about how the Covid stimulus would result in inflation

Microeconomics maybe. Macro is highly speculative since there is borderline no basis for experimentation and inference, and every incidence has no precedence. This is very broadly understood and accepted by economists themselves

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