Contrarian is probably referring to the Rasputin like celebrity pundit economists who are funded and promoted by undeclared vested interests. Like the realtors backing Friedman (or was it Hayek?) and those Freakonomics guys.

I'm TOTALLY FINE with lobbying, patronage, sponsorship, and bias. More than fine. If its declared.

But even "serious economists" like you have to admit there's personalities claiming expertise you know they lack. The whole Gell-Mann Amnesia thing. Those times someone on TV spews some nonsense that makes you want to kick a puppy in outrage.

Agreed, idiot-punditry is alive and well in all areas of specialized domain knowledge. Charlatans make me want to kick things in outrage as well.

> Remember that all models are wrong, but some are useful.

I can't count the number of times I've heard that trotted out as a tired defense of bad modelling. All models are wrong: some are useful, some are dangerous. Are you sure you can distinguish between those categories?

> Possibly the main missing point is that the book appears to be uninformed that there are many economic scholars researching inequality, race[1], feminism[2], environmentalism[3], and other progressive areas[4].

I don't think either the reviewer or the book itself are claiming that there are no economists that study those causes. It sounds like the book claims that postwar economists have enjoyed unaccountable policy influence, and their methodology has blinded them to certain consequences of their advice.

> Are you sure you can distinguish between those categories?

Typically yes, through appropriate risk assessment. Cue "Antifragile" here.

So what does "appropriate risk assessment" look like? Vary some parameters and add confidence bounds to your outputs?

If you're building an economic model and they economy enters a regime that you haven't seen before in your data, your model calibration is going to crumble. So maybe good models can be distinguished from bad when predicated on the assumption that the near future looks like the past. But when that changes (i.e. when you need your models most) is when your models become least reliable.

It's really not a question of how bad an economic model is, but whether there exists a better one we can use in its place. When people criticize (often rightly) economic models and point out their limitations, there is an implication that we should abandon them because they are so flawed. But this is wrong. It is not enough to avoid flawed models; we need something demonstrably better to replace them with, and this is where the critics tend to come up short.

Suppose we get rid of economists and their models; then what do we use in their place to guide policy? Our intuition? No thanks. If someone has a superior theory of the economy, they must show it with logic and empirical observation. Until they do, we are stuck with our more flawed models.

> Suppose we get rid of economists and their models; then what do we use in their place to guide policy? Our intuition?

Controlled small-scale experiments? Ethnography? Historical analysis? Debate among stakeholders?

Why do decisions have to be justified using mathematical models? Especially when those models have to be simplified to the point where they're really just "stories" (Paul Krugman's words) about economies? Why not just tell the stories in English?

In a number of fields where the object of study is particularly complex - biology and medicine being notable examples - mathematical models are ineffective. What makes you think the economy is different?

Because you can say things in mathematics that are hard to say in English. The stories are clearer when expressed in mathematical form. It's harder to bullshit your way through.

Before the 70s/80s, everyone was somewhat confused about what they were arguing, particularly in macroeconomics. Now it's much clearer the kinds of claims we are making about the world.

I absolutely disagree. As an exercise, try translating a representative agent / rational expectations / DSGE model into English and see how ridiculous it sounds.

Mathematics might force you to be internally consistent, but it also forces you to make bad assumptions. You can prove anything by reasoning from a faulty premise.

Everyone who stays away from writing down a mathematical model is either confused themselves, or trying to confuse their readers. The advantage of a model with a representative agent, or rational expectations, is that I can see the assumption right there. They made it perfectly clear. They didn't try to fool me with a barrage of words. If I think their explanation is wrong because people are irrational, or because the agent heterogeneity is important, I can take their model and show how it falsifies their results.

And one important thing we learned from those models (which I agree do not work) is that we don't get business cycles from irrationality or from agent heterogeneity -- we get them from the failure of markets to clear. Economists were confused about this for like a century, and thanks to mathematical modeling it became clear.

> Everyone who stays away from writing down a mathematical model is either confused themselves, or trying to confuse their readers.

That seems like a profoundly narrow viewpoint to me. I mean maybe you're right in the sense that there might be an equation that governs the evolution of the universe, but are you really saying mathematical models are the only way to approach research?

If so I strongly recommend you do some scientific reading outside of economics and physics. I think most interesting phenomena in the world are too complex to capture in mathematics. Physics is a profound outlier in that regard.

> And one important thing we learned from those models (which I agree do not work) is that we don't get business cycles from irrationality or from agent heterogeneity -- we get them from the failure of markets to clear. Economists were confused about this for like a century, and thanks to mathematical modeling it became clear.

I really don't think that's clear at all.

I have done plenty of reading outside of economics and physics, as well as reading in the history of economics. It is clear to me that economics stumbled around in the dark until the mathematical modeling revolution. There are very few interesting phenomena in economics that we can't capture in a model.

Antifragile thinking is not really mainstream economics, is it ?

Thank you vey much for your comment. I agree with most of your thoughts and learned a lot from it.

Specifically, the FUD part sort of worked on me a bit in retrospect. The book was likely written this way because it gets listened to and sells copies.

That said just because there is a dash of spin doesn't mean it is any less true.