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An even better one would be to say that economists are like the consultants to a massive and public government IT project thats 300 years into the making. Complexity built into the system from the start leads to recurring issues that can't be addressed because of entrenched managers, lazy analysts, and a 300 million line codebase.

Thats not to say that if they started from scratch there wouldn't be some unforeseen bugs down the road.

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A bigger problem (see my Galbraith quote above) is that Economics seems curiously immune to the process of testability and improvement which are the hallmarks of real science. In fact, several key and foundational theorists expressly deny falsifiability or evidence-based theories.

Which is sort of like writing code without ever referring to your specification, use-cases, and/or users, or in fact, compiling or running it.

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