Economics is not such a robust science as physics.

A famous example is from 2010 and affected the response to the crisis: https://www.nytimes.com/2013/04/19/opinion/krugman-the-excel...

Wall Street quant bros thought they had analytical models for prices that were based on reasonable math and science. Turns out, their models vastly under-estimated the probability of a big crash. Apparently there was even a big hegdge fund based on these ideas, Long-term Capital Management, which went bust in the late 1990's, but still the "consensus" ignored it and moved on.

N.N. Taleb writes about some of this in "The Black Swan", which I'm sure most readers here already know about. I would also recommend Benoit Mandelbrot's (yes, that Mandelbrot's) "The Misbehavior of Markets". https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/665134.The_Mis_Behavior_...

Peripherally some Wall Street companies involved had an insatiable hunger for physicists and mathematicians. There was bemoaning that the brightest minds were going to Wall Steeet instead of research. The company thinking that they could apply all of the scientific modeling to markets. It worked until the 2008 crisis hit and then it didn't and they lost their shirts and were living out of their Lexuses.

Personally I suspect the underlying issue is a fundamental lack of concern for truth and its origins just wanting to make money so they throw resources at it without concerns about the why and how to get what they want to hear short term.

That trend is repeating itself in other sectors with misuse of neural networks - and I mean that in a functional sense as opposed to an ethical one. Regardless of the ethics of facial recognition in law enforcement it simply doesn't scale to huge data sets and is being treated as "has to be right" instead of viewing it as the coarse filter it is will lead to problems unless one is sociopathic enough to consider that a feature.

yeah, that seems to be complete bullshit. that crisis was 100% greed and bad governance

Economies have been led technocracies since at least the 80s. There are numerous ways the academia failed to predict the financial crisis, and on the contrary facilitated it: https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/22a9/5fc8524947c1b7f985bd75...

The 'greed and bad governance' claim is bogus: one the one hand, it was was academically-approved 'greed', and 'bad goverment' had little to with the collapse of private institutions that the US government had to save.

You're making claims that are entirely unsupported by anything you've provided or said. The paper linked makes the claim towards the failure of academic economics failing to predict the Financial crisis of 2008, not science.

(This also completely ignores that it seems to be a book passage rather than a review and well cited article in a Journal).

You've imposed your own narrative on the article written about Latour here and bought up wild claims about 2008 with no relevance to the discussion at hand.

I actually don't know what your point is other than to rally against the NYT and it sniffs of personal bias the whole way down.

I doubt you've read the article.

And I'll just leave this selected quote here from the article you did link.

"* This opinion paper is the outcome of one week of intense discussions within the working group on ‘Modeling of Financial Markets’ at the 98 th Dahlem Workshop, 2008. "