Sunday 24 August 2014

Economics. What is it good for?

Reading this and this got me thinking.

If we think that we know all this stuff, the temptation - on the part of prodnoses - is to use it to interfere.

Alternatively we could think of economics as a discipline that tells us why we need to tell those prodnoses to bugger off.?  That is its best purpose.  Telling people why they should NOT do stuff.

Is economics best use as a negative or positive thing?

Discuss and inform me.

4 comments:

James Higham said...

Depends which economics. Keynesian?

A K Haart said...

I'm no economist so I was hoping for some interesting comments here.

It seems to me that economics is often used negatively for a good reason. To be used positively it would need a track record of accurate prediction.

So does it have that track record?

Mark Wadsworth said...

AKH, the Georgists have a good track record on predictions.

Lola said...

Ah hem. Did you notice that this got cross posted at the ASI by Timmy? Coo.