this post was submitted on 20 Aug 2023
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Well the sentience and self-determination of the agents involve, in my mind, make the constituent agents significantly more difficult to predict in the case of the economy than predicting the weather.
Do... You disagree? Maybe I'm missing something, I probably am, I'm not a smart man... But it appears that you're appealing broadly towards some echo of "rational market theory" and I don't really understand how people do that in the age of Elon Musk. Many major factors in how the economy works are governed by passionate and irrational agents.
The air, and pressure systems, while complex, aren't rational or irrational. They don't have childhood trauma, fear, mortality... Greed, desire of any kind.
So, you're right, I suppose I can't show that humans are more difficult to predict the behaviours than air. It seems obvious to me, but I can and will freely admit the difference between what I know, and what I think I know.
I guess, from my undeducated and naive perspective, economics is primarily applied sociology with some pretty rudimentary math sprinkled in... And so I would assume that it would inherit the same issues as sociology (being that it's actually pretty hard to develop models to describe how groups of people behave).
I don't mean to strike a nerve. I took like 2 econ courses like 15 years ago... so I admit I have a super elementary understanding of what the study entails. I'm just a guy on the internet with not a very valuable opinion on the subject, coloured primarily by what, in my opinion, the study of economics has failed to do or achieve, rather than having an in depth understanding of what the study is.