Eh, I wouldn't put economists in the same category as generals or engineers. They are more like clergy or court astrologers. Their job is to make the numbers work for the politicians, who in turn work for the bankers.

Yes, the clergy/court astrologer comparison is very apt.

A few are more like engineers (e.g. see Steve Keen's work) but they're not the ones who get the plum jobs in government, powerful NGOs or banks - they tend to be professors in backwater universities.

>> Listen to the 'respectable' economists

Isn't that kind of a subjective opinion?

Liberals love to push Keynes economic theories and hold him up as some kind of expert. Likewise, Conservatives love to push Friedman's theories on the economy since it fits with their staunch free market ideas.

Even in these circles it would be hard to find someone who's actually objective about what they're seeing.

>Isn't that kind of a subjective opinion?

I wasn't using it as such. If an economist gets the ear of a president, is employed by the ECB (as the above economists were) or a column in the New York Times they're 'respectable'.

>Liberals love to push Keynes economic theories and hold him up as some kind of expert.

Conservatives use his theories too. Republican politicians who fight tooth and nail for military spending in their districts know exactly what they're doing and why.

>Even in these circles it would be hard to find someone who's actually objective about what they're seeing.

A good litmus test of this is to look at their predictions and see how they stack up to reality.

Some predictions are just bad, some are so persistently awful that they indicate that the economist has incentives that lead them to tell flat out lies.

The above graph is a good example of that.

Another, even better, litmus test is whether they ever change their mind when they've been wrong.

Liberals don't push 'Keynes' - they push 'big spending all the time as a means to redistribute wealth' - and use the cover of 'Keynes' as credibility.

'Keynes' advocated for gov. spending in downturns and saving in upturns.

The problem is:

A) Progressives want to spend, infinitely. There is no 'saving period'. Ergo - it's nothing to do with Keynes really.

B) It's really hard to tell what a 'downturn' is. 'Restoring confidence in markets' and picking up some infrastructure spending when industry is in a lull - this is on paper - a great idea. BUT - when a market has undergone a 'secular shift' - meaning that the lost jobs are not due to cyclical issues, but are permanent ... then the government ends up throwing good money after bad.

Put another way: Keynes urged spending in down cycles to level out volatility and stabilize employment. But any given downturn may not be a 'cycle' - with an impending uptick. A 'downturn' may be permanent - like 'lost jobs to China' etc..

The 'solution' to a downturn has to be commensurate with the causes: cyclical shift? Ok, some infrastructure / gov investment might help. Millions of jobs lost to China? Gov. spending will only delay the inevitable. Better to invest in 'retooling' the workforce etc.. But this is not an 'economic' solution - it's a business/strategy solution and it takes intelligence.

It is completely subjective, but it's also obvious that the Keynesians won that battle a long time ago. Go into any classroom, economics conference, FOMC meeting, etc. Keynesian theories enjoy the status of being unassailable, objective facts. Austrian and other schools of thought are mocked, derided and dismissed wholesale.

If you have actually checked out Steve Keen's presentations and/or writing you would have learned that what is being presented as "Keynesian economics" is more correctly "Samuelsonian economics". This after Paul Samuelson that sat down and basically rewrote everything Keynes to fit it into the very economic models that Keynes was attacking.

I don't much follow salt-water economics, but is that true? That Keynesians think they are actually right?

Yes. - Keynesian economics major

How many of those 'respectable' economists predicted the 2008 crash? I'm skeptical of the entire ability of the profession to make any large scale policy decisions.

Why is predicting a particular economic event the qualification? Sure, predicting the future is nice, but what I want to know is whether it would have happened under the policies favoured by economists, whether the effects would have been as severe, whether long-term economic growth and stability would be better or worse, whether human welfare would be improved, whether technological advancement would be greater, whether we'd be happier, healthier, safer...

The 2008 crash sucked for a lot of people, but if your economic goal is simply to foresee it or forestall it, you're asking for far too little. It seems a bit like asking why so-called public health experts weren't able to prevent those two cases of Ebola in 2014, while ignoring the 50 000 annual flu+pneumonia deaths and the 600k heart disease deaths--as well as the fact that they stopped ebola infections at two.

Because the ability to predict outcomes is a key validator of any scientific field. If civil engineers couldn't predict if a bridge will hold up or fall then we couldn't and shouldn't rely on huge portions of our transpiration network. Similarly with economists, if the field can't forecast the instability of a major sector of our economy then we shouldn't put a tremendous amount of trust on their field for policy.

And 2008 wasn't just any economic event, it was a major event which nearly took down the world economy because the financial sector hyperextended and intertwined risks. The economic field had no widely accepted or reliable metric to predict that crash.

Public health experts have a very good model for spreads of diseases, models which have been validated many times against real world data, and then therefore can be relied upon to direct resources to help prevent dangerous spreads of disease. Not so with the economic field...

Though I don't know many predictions on 2008, many economists did correctly predict how badly the Eurozone would end up due to the single currency but different fiscally policies.

Germany (basically the strongest eurozone country) has only grown something like 0.7% annually over the past 8 years

Quite. That was my point.