The reality is that purist economic theories exist in vacuums, totally divorced from all the sectors of the real world they supposedly "study". Economists are totally useless, usually worse than useless, when the realities of business, markets, domestic policies, international relations, etc., don't match up with their theories.
Real life is more complex than their laboratories and think tanks.
Most of us who have bothered to get real educations actually have studied economics, but as an addition to other fields of study, not as a total replacement of such, along with total rejection of common sense and observation.
“You are just the sort of person groups such as Cato need to evangelize their message. You take their theoretical talking points and go forth to spread the gospel, unhampered by any other education or real world experience.”
Do you have one iota of knowledge about what my real world experience is or isn’t?
“The reality is that purist economic theories exist in vacuums, totally divorced from all the sectors of the real world they supposedly “study”.”
Cite an example of such a theory.
“Economists are totally useless, usually worse than useless, when the realities of business, markets, domestic policies, international relations, etc., don’t match up with their theories.”
So you’re lumping all economists in the same boat, huh? Cite some examples.
“Real life is more complex than their laboratories and think tanks.”
Give an example of something economists say that reflects this statement.
“Most of us who have bothered to get real educations actually have studied economics, but as an addition to other fields of study, not as a total replacement of such, along with total rejection of common sense and observation.”
Cite an example of an economist who does not observe.
Of course, anybody who knows anything about science knows that the first thing that must be jettisoned is our common sense, because it is so often wrong. Only observation of empirical data and reason, with a little imagination, can help us. Relying on our intuitions, scientists didn’t discover and could not explain why a thrown object continues to move until let go. It took Newton, with his math and reason, rather than common sense, to discover that an object remains in a state of uniform motion unless acted upon by another force.
Common sense and observation would tell you the Earth is flat, and that the sun moves while the Earth remains motionless. But that’s not scientific, because it relies on one observer in one location assuming that his perspective is king.
Likewise, economists are in the business of seeing the economy as a whole, not from the perspective of one single person, or of a single span of time.