within a limited time horizon that is. IIRC meteorological forecasts are about 80% accurate a few days in, 50% accurate about two weeks into the future, and after that of not much use.

Economics of course is often expected to make much stronger claims, people have expectations of it that resemble Asimov's psychohistory despite the fact that there is no science that manages to tame that level of complexity.

I think it was Tyler Cowen who said once that economics is more useful as a tool to clarify thought rather than a tool to make predictions. People just have the wrong expectation of what economics is.

Meteorology is much easier because the act of working out what the weather will do next, won't have an effect on weather. Not so in economics!

My intuition says there's probably a kind of uncertainty principle or incompleteness theorem at play in economics.

Economics at its base is group psychology, and humans are irrational and wildly unpredictable. A lot of economics writing depends on a rational human that actually doesn’t exist.

Hence why a lot of economics is speculative and should only really be applicable to specific cultures that are being studied, since cultural behaviors and expectations will effect economic behaviors and outcomes.

There’s a balance between data and interpretation in economics, which is why it’s a social science. There are disciplines like Austrian economics that discount quantitative analysis, but that’s as wrong as relying purely on quantitative analysis.

A human is irrational and wildly unpredictable, but groups of people (like most animals) are more easily predicted. While it's difficult to predict a specific stock, it's easier to predict trends given global situations, within a certain time frame, with enough information. The main problem becomes having access to such information. So much of the economy is global now, and behind closed doors, that information is unavailable or at a premium.

It works the other way too. If everybody believes that your model is correct, the chances are very good that its predictions actually become true.

That's the driving force behind a lot of religions and other traditions.

>IIRC meteorological forecasts are about 80% accurate a few days in, 50% accurate about two weeks into the future, and after that of not much use.

80% accurate about what ? If this is overall then I'm not impressed because in stable weather you'll get a high % of being right just by extrapolating. Similar with economics for that matter. What I usually care about and where weather forecast failed me just last month, is unstable time over a specific area. Just last weekend my wife and I were about to cancel our trip to my hometown because the forecast was high probability of rain for the entire weekend, this was the forecast on Friday. Went anyway and got a sunny Saturday and Sunday morning, got a bit cloudy by the end of Sunday when we were leaving. This happens so often that I don't know why I bother checking anymore.

> IIRC meteorological forecasts are about 80% accurate a few days in, 50% accurate about two weeks into the future, and after that of not much use.

I think the accuracy is more complicated than that, because while they lose precision (and thereby the correct prediction of the amount of rain in your neighborhood or town), they can predict larger movements pretty accurately pretty far in the future. I remember how bad weather prediction was 30-40 years ago, and am shocked how they now have pretty good insight into the weather two or three weeks from now.

we had have chaos theory. it indicates that we just can not predict things in too far future

Well, there has been a little-noticed revolution in meteorology in the US in the past 15 years, driven by improved simulations and measurement systems (mostly funded by the federal government). Our predictive capability is well over 10x improved from just the late 90s when it was still quite poor.

Not in Seattle. Today was forecast as a dry day (even this morning), but it rained. I tend to do better just by stepping outside, sniffing the air, and looking at the clouds. It's not expertise on my part, just experience.