But, numbers don’t lie, and unlike economists, engineers don’t let numbers lie and we don’t make simplifying assumptions... if engineers did their math the way economists did, you’d see engineering papers start out like this:
“Assume there’s no friction or gravity...”
In defense of the study of economics, engineers make many simplifying assumption. If you remember studying Newtons laws in school you might remember something like this "suppose Johnny throws a baseball at such and such and angle and speed. Calculate how far the ball will travel?" Newton's laws assume their is not air resistance. This is an obvious flaw in using this, but calculation can get immensely complex if you try to account for all variables. Do we have to account differences in humidity, temperature, atmospheric pressure, wind direction and speed, the roughness of the baseball, etc. to get an acceptable formula? Depending on the conditions, probably not.
The problem with economics, in my humble opinion, is the reliance on the work of Keynes. He theory contains many bad assumptions. The stagflation of the 1970's should not have been possible in Keyne's model. If you read the work of more conservative economist such as Walter Williams, Milton Friedman, even the old Austrians like Ludwig von Mises and Murray Rothbard do not seem to have things happen "unexpectdly" like modern Keyne's and Krugmanites do.
The reason such thinkers do not gain popularity is they have so silver bullet government cavalry rides to the rescue. The system naturally favors economist who can give the government the glory since they pay the bills both with the Fed and Universities as major employers of economist.
Yes, that’s in school... where no one is going to use the computations for real.
In the real world, after engineers are doing work where people’s lives and property depend upon the result, no, we don’t make simplifying assumptions. PE’s get brought forward on malpractice suits for making stupid computation errors and simplifying assumptions like that.
Economists make school-level simplifying assumptions when there are billions to trillions of dollars on the line... and they don’t even blink an eye.... because there’s no way to bring these clowns to account for malpractice and stupidity. Economists never suffer anything but mild reputational damages for being stupidly wrong - they’ll say something hugely stupid and then they’ll do some penance time off in the academic wilderness for a little while, and then they’re right back at it with another goddamn goofy theory or idea.
Take for example the nonsense behind the Black-Scholes theory of option pricing. The underlying equity or contract pricing doesn’t move in nice, gaussian distributions. Price movements, as Mandelbrot showed with cotton futures, have bimodal distributions which reflect the mania and panic at either end of the price movement. There’s no nice, thin, gaussian tails to the distribution. The movements 2SD (or more) removed from the mean aren’t anywhere near as rare as these Nobel-winning yahoos predict - yet all of Wall Street uses their nonsense for option pricing. When a couple of these Nobel-winning clowns went into the hedge fund business at LTCM, they plowed it straight into the ground and started the pattern of Fed-assisted (or orchestrated) bailouts, which came back to bite us (nice and hard, too) into 2008.
They should be rounded up and shipped off to forced labor camps to mine gold in their BVD’s.