Every few years, someone makes a video or writes a book declaring that economics is broken. The economists got the crash wrong, they say. They missed the inflation. They cannot predict anything, and they charge for the privilege of being wrong in public. The latest version blames the discipline itself - and the economics departments that produce its priesthood - for the state of the world.
I have some sympathy with the anger and none with the conclusion. The anger is aimed at the right people. The conclusion is aimed at the wrong thing, and getting that distinction right matters more than winning the argument, because the same mistake is being made all over the map - in economics, in climate, in physics in every field where a science has been hijacked by its fortune-tellers.
Here is the distinction in one sentence. A science explains why things happen. It was never designed to predict exactly what happens next.
Supply and demand explain why prices rise when something is scarce. They did not tell you, in 2020, that a pandemic would scramble shipping and send the price of a used car through the roof. Incentives explain why people do more of what is rewarded. They did not tell you which politician would weaponize them next. Trade explains why both sides gain when they exchange. It did not tell you that a government would decide, in a fit of nationalism, to strangle it.
The principles are like the laws of motion. They describe the forces. They do not tell you where every leaf will land. No honest physicist would sell you a leaf-trajectory service, and no honest economist should sell you a ten-year economic forecast with a number on it. The ones who do are not practicing economics. They are practicing astrology with a graph attached, and they have borrowed the scientist’s white coat to do it.
Why do the forecasts fail, even when they are made in good faith? For the same reason weather forecasts fail beyond a week: the system is complicated, the inputs are many, and small differences at the start become large differences later. An economy is not a machine with a predictable output. It is a conversation between billions of people, each responding to what everyone else does. The moment a forecast becomes public, people change their behavior in response to it - which is one of the reasons the forecast then fails. Economists call this reflexivity. The rest of us call it life.
And then there is the political hand. When a politician needs a number to justify a policy, they do not hire an honest forecaster. They hire someone who will produce the number they want, or they appoint one, or they lean on the institution until the number appears. This is not a theory. Every country with a treasury does it. The forecasts that make the news are the forecasts that serve a policy. The honest ones, full of “on the other hand” and “it depends,” do not make the news, because they do not make good headlines.
The climate models have the same disease, and watching that debate has taught me something worth saying plainly. The science of climate may be right or wrong - reasonable people can argue about how settled it is - but the models have a record, and the record is not what the certainty-sellers claimed. The models have consistently projected more warming than has actually happened, decade after decade. The direction was right. The magnitude was overshot. And the culture around the models never adjusted its confidence, never said “we ran hot, let us recalibrate,” never conceded that a forty-year overshoot is information. That is not science behaving like science. That is a priesthood defending its predictions.
Notice the pattern. The science explains the mechanism. The model projects the trajectory. The forecaster sells the projection as fact. And when the projection fails, the forecaster blames the model, or the data, or the timescale - never the method of selling certainty.
A video I watched blames economics for all of this. It is the same category error as blaming billionaires for buying influence: the complaint is real, and the target is wrong. Money only matters in politics because government has the power to sell. Forecasts only matter in public life because we keep treating a guess with a spreadsheet as a fact. The problem is not the discipline. The problem is the certainty - and the market for it.
So what do you do with an economist? Learn the principles, and ignore the predictions. The principles are the map. They will not tell you the future, but they will tell you why the past happened, which is the only reliable guide to what is likely - not certain, likely - to happen next. When someone tells you they know exactly what the economy will do next year, or exactly how hot it will be in 2050, or exactly what a policy will cost, ask them the questions this site was built on - the Seven Questions. The first one is the one the certainty-sellers dread most: how do you know?
I do not know what the economy will do next year. Neither does the person on the news who sounds like they do. The difference is, I am not charging you for pretending otherwise.
This is an opinion piece by Ryan, the owner of this site. It is not a forecast.