经济学家有什么用？

May 10, 2013 Dani Rodrik

坎布里奇——当赌注很高时，政治对手利用从经济学家和其他研究人员那里得来的一切证据并没有什么希奇。美国保守派政客和欧盟官员利用卡门·莱因哈特和肯尼斯•罗格夫等两位哈佛教授的研究来佐证财政紧缩政策恰恰是这样的实例。

莱因哈特和罗格夫发表的论文似乎表明公共债务在GDP占比超过90%会显著拖累经济增长水平。阿莫斯特市马萨诸塞大学的三名经济学家随后完成了学者应该完成的工作——他们重新审核了同事的研究工作，并对其进行了批评。

除一处相对次要的电子表格错误外，他们发现莱因哈特/罗格夫研究所采用的某些方法使人对结果的可靠性产生了怀疑。最重要的是尽管债务水平和经济增长呈负相关关系，但90%临界值的设定却缺乏事实依据的支撑。而且就像很多人指出的那样，这种关系可能是由低增长引发高负债、而不是反向过程所导致的。

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0 Comments on this paragraph, 17 in all 17 Comments on this article

raul ramos May 11, 2014

10 may 2014 manila, ph

economy in an intelligent view,

“. . . . . . . don't worry about a crisis”
http://www.cnbc.com/id/101658541

“. . . . . . . doesn't see debt as a big problem”
with high respect to sir kenneth rogoff. sir thomas d. cabot
professor of public policy and professor of economics at
harvard university. chief economist and director of research
at the international monetary fund. just to put on record.
it is my pride for you to be a part of all my writings with
regards to u.s. economy, our economy and the economy of
the entire countries of the whole world. i already stated in
all my writings that debt per se is good. debt means growth.
but today’s debt is exactly and absolutely the opposite of
growth. again, why? simple, today’s economy is precisely
moving in the wrong, incorrect directions. accumulating
debt, compounding by the hour by the minutes is truly
fatal. i wish and pray you had a brighter, clever, brilliant
idea. thanks’

facebook: thegreatdepression.part2@yahoo.com

please kindly take good care and God bless . . . . . . . raul
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Ayse Tezcan Jun 14, 2013

Same goes for epidemiologists. Every association that is put out has a risk to be interpreted as causal and used by special interests. I am not sure whether there is remedy for the problem that stems from human nature...
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Edward Ponderer May 15, 2013

In his 1989 NEW REALITIES, among a number of insightful predictions, Peter F. Drucker warns of the implication of a global economy on 4 tiers of nonlinear equations as likely indicating deterministic chaos. The reasons that such was not noticed were that we were still in the relatively early throws of globalization. For one thing, the Internet was still in its infancy. Nonlinear effects moved slowly enough that decently insightful economists like Milton Friedman could still takes measures, recognize drift, and course correct. Also, America still being the dominant economic superpower, those corrections had strong enough teeth. Coordinating with America, the world economy could keep stable. But now globalization has come to full strength and still grows stronger. Evermore links crossing between economic layers -- and evermore coupling strengths to those links, evermore diffusion of economic control, evermore unstable swelling and random gambling by distributed powerful individuals, evermore distrust. And the Internet baby has grown up at warp speed -- giving it all a fully-functional nervous system. In short, we are entering a full-fledged chaos, which like the Internet itself, can no longer be mapped, measured, and predicted -- not in time, or with any power, to implement anything more than almost random noise -- delaying a dam burst at the cost of greater total cost at best, and just making the decay accelerate from the get go at worst (i.e., it might be better to just fold your hands and do nothing). As all systems in nature, there is no longer a simple black box to homeostasis, but rather the full complexity of the system must be taken into account -- and only the system itself can do that. We must assist in the evolution of this via the one thing that we can. This is using educational and media psychology means to create an environment conducive to a sense of mutual responsibility -- the type of "altruism" seem in the members of successful natural systems. We must switch from the top-down view of economics, to this bottom-up behavioral model, if we are to permit the entire system of global Humanity -- and in particular its economics -- to evolve into a healthy, literally biological system. The alternative is to enter a full-scale nonlinearity in which natural entropy can only magnify to chaos ("Murphy's law") and lead to the death of the system before it is born. Please give pause and serious consideration to this -- because this is not some abortion statistic -- we are, altogether 7 billion of us -- the fetus in question.
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Stamatis Kavvadias May 15, 2013

It is pretty obvious that economists are more appreciated in politics than can be supported by the immature science supporting their knowledge. It is astonishing that the author does not even go as far as to express an opinion on what the problem is in the evolution of economic science. Contrary to other comments, I tend to believe that the problem is not in the complexity of studying a system that involves human will as a parameter, but rather in trying to fit this behavior in specific simplistic patterns of limited representativeness, usually based on holistic preconceptions of such behavior. In other words, the problem is in expecting a specific behavior, that we could understand or like, instead of modeling a range of behaviors. To me, this is lack of academic motivation, and, in did, I believe the biggest problem for the evolution of economic science lies in schools of thought that are tightly linked to views of society and economy as it "should" be. The deeper an economist gets involved in understanding how economies work, the more he confuses philosophy with economics, possibly under the influence of Adams Smith. In my eyes, for economics to mature, they need to transition from qualitative understanding of the economy to quantitative understanding, exactly as computers have. The object is not human behavior but, behavior of economies, and demonstrably predictive models need to be built. The chase of causality must stop its pursuit of being established to human behavior (which is for psychologists). Meanwhile, the irresponsibility of technocrats is very lightly judged, when they advise politicians, or when they defend institutions (or lack of them) and schools of thought that have no supporting evidence behind them, or base their claims on evidence have not even gone through peer reviewed publication yet! The costs for society are too grave for this to be tolerated any longer!
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Zsolt Hermann May 13, 2013

This question in the title presumes economists, or bankers, or politicians, or anybody else operate in isolation, following their own rules, practice.
But this is impossible.
We are all existing in the same interconnected network, we keep forgetting humanity is a single species based on the same nature and principles, each and every human being is moved by the same software, and our individual actions are simply the manifestation of the same software through the filters of our individual character.
Thus if we presume that the world is not functioning well, that we are in a crisis, or we even say humanity is at crossroads, it is completely pointless trying to blame individuals, or professions, cultural and racial groups in isolation.
We need to change the software that moves all of us.
Up to this point humanity was driven by our self centered, egoistic imprint, making us think, act, move each and every second towards ourselves, for our own benefit, for our own pleasure.
And it worked, although through a lot of suffering and pain propelling humanity to the level we achieved so far.
But the conditions have changed.
We have evolved, been locked into today's global, fully interconnected and interdependent human network, this human network is fully merged into the natural environment around.
In this new system, every selfish move, every motion that does not take the whole system, its mutual, common well-being into consideration is doomed to failure, reaching the initial "perpetrator" as a boomerang with multiple force.
The first step is to fully accept and understand the principles of a globally integral human society and all of its implications.
Not only finances, economy, the global crisis depend on it, but our survival, we cannot cheat, blackmail or even change the vast natural system we exist in giving us these conditions.
Only we can change.
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Rodrigo Botafogo May 13, 2013

I agree with Anthony when he claims that economics is not a "science" in the legitimate sense and that economists have failed to introduce predictive models. I´m not an economist and I have thus limited knowledge of the field. But it seems to me that while economists insist in starting from unreal premises they´ll never be able to have any predictive models. Can one really believe that economic agents are rational? If so, the whole field of psychology/psychiatry would be useless and Spock would feel at home here on earth. Also, how can we believe that markets are efficient? There are large asymmetries between agents and how they can gather and distribute information.
Removing those premises will require large changes in economics. Although hard, I don´t see any other way to really produce predictive models and bring economics closer to a legitimate science.
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Chris Mante May 13, 2013

Okay. I'll grant economists are not sufficiently worldly to anticipate how their "scientific" results are likely to be used by lobbyists, politicians, special interests and sundry other less principled, lower intellect types. THAT SAID: is it too much to ask that when these inhabitants of academic cloud cuckoo land are widely (if inappropriately) cited as experts who support the self-interested "truths" of lesser men and women that instead of basking in their 15 minutes of recognition, these natural born wonders issue a statement saying "that is not what I meant at all"?
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Pingfan Hong May 12, 2013

At least R&R tried to find evidence from historical data, and the error they had can happen in many researches in the field of "hard sciences". In comparison, many other economists, include those who chastised R&R in commentaries, don't even bother to look into evidence when they give policy advice, purely driven by ideology. Ther are even worse cases, when economists calibrate their "models" according to their predefined political objectives and claim the results are "model-based" and "scientific" .
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Arvind Gupta May 12, 2013

The fault, dear Brutus, lies not in Reinhart-Rogoff but in that we were easily gullible, swayed by pedigree, susceptible to the halo effect, ......

In many ways this is a typical "Kuhnian" process of competition amongst competing paradigms; with each protagonist using all means available to assert primacy.
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radek tanski May 11, 2013

My fav quote from von mises about economists.

"The development of a profession of economists is an offshoot of interventionism. The professional economist is the specialist who is instrumental in designing various measures of government interference with business. He is an expert in the field of economic legislation, which today invariably aims at hindering the operation of the market economy."
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Procyon Mukherjee May 11, 2013

When the purpose of belief is to further the cause of advancement in the academia and if that could be done by selective use of data with a mix of bias, we have the current milieu of Economists mired in controversy.

Bartley’s immortal book, “The Retreat to Commitment” holds some glaring examples as to the nature of the question of dilemma of ultimate commitment. The biggest impediment to any free thinking is the ‘belief’ embedded in the mind itself, before any hypothesis is even formed through observation or data gathering. On the contrary some of these beliefs tend to influence the very hypothesis and the gathering of instances or data that would later prove the hypothesis itself.
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Marc Laventurier May 10, 2013

As someone concerned with both the logic and utility of knowledge representation in AI, Dani's characterization of 'achievement'in professional economics in his last paragraph rings true, but must be over-generalized. For all the nit-wits in Chicago (Glen Weyl excepted), there is a Jeff Sachs who at least knows about the human terrain beneath the cute map with the late-capitalist legend.
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Manfred Dix May 10, 2013

So, Dani, what was *your* clever addition to economics that landed your nice position at the KSG?
As for Reinhart/Rogoff, most people forget that their paper was and is still a *working* paper, not a published one. But, alas, everybody had to jump all over them, right?
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Brett Blake May 10, 2013

A few years back, peer-reviewed academic journals undertook to publish both data and code used in the research they published, though its application was haphazard and incomplete. It also seems to have fallen by the wayside as researchers refused to release one or both, intending to "dine out" on their proprietary data as much as possible. I understand the impulse. Data is time and labor intensive to build, however, the Reinhart-Rogoff fiasco (as in Edward Pinto's flawed work) points out how important that initiative can be.

In policy making scenarios, at the very least, the refusal to make data and code public should be noted and pressure put on researchers to make both available.
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Ralph Musgrave May 10, 2013

Rogoff’s claim not the be a “deficit hawk” is laughable. Look at this Project Syndicate article from last year, full of emotive, scary language clearly designed to give us bad dreams about the debt.

http://www.project-syndicate.org/commentary/austerity-and-debt-realism
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Anthony Juan Bautista May 10, 2013

Nice article!

In my estimation, the primary reason that economics is not "science" in the legitimate sense, is because the field has yet to introduce models with useful predictive power (most likely because whether they know it or not, economists are modeling complex systems).

Meaning, the models of modern economics have failed to be more powerful (failed to add incremental usefulness) as compared to those econ/philosophical first principals elucidated 100's and sometimes 1000's of years ago.

The micro and behavioral models are likely more powerful, mostly because they are narrow in scope.
- Anthony Juan Bautista May 10, 2013
  
  Another way to think about things: if something is "true", it can be modeled with some accuracy. What does this say about "truth" in economics?
  A new reply to this comment has been posted.
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https://prosyn.org/4qgKCw9zh

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