You have a point, but unfortunately, the only discipline which claims any real insights into fixing the economy is economics. You know, the "dismal science." It is the discipline in which the introductory books outline the basic rules. Supply, demand, production possibilities curves, all that sensible, good stuff. It all makes sense --- experts in economics should be able to wisely guide nations and markets, right?

Then, the intermediate-level books and classes teach you that some of that intro-level supply-demand stuff is pretty wrong. It only operates under all sorts of unrealistic conditions, kind of like equations in high school physics which disregard friction. So intermediate econ outline all sorts of complications which supposedly help in the real world.

Then, in the seminar-level classes, you learn that none of the intermediate-level theories really ever worked except by accident, and no one who tries to predict or model real-world economic conditions agrees on anything.

I think that the dynamics of the latest bubble burst had more to do with psychology, sociology and the moral questions of old than economics, and increasingly people are viewing it that way. What we're dealing with is to a large extent an emotional phenomenon. Trust has flown out, fear has arisen, panic has set in, assumptions are being reanalyzed, and blame is being placed.

"You have a point, but unfortunately, the only discipline which claims any real insights into fixing the economy is economics."

I've asked this question recently here on HN,

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=415683

so I'll follow up in this thread. What would you recommend someone read who wants to learn something more about economics?

"Limited Life Experiences + Overgeneralization = Advice" - Paul Buchheit

There are references, supporting materials, and backup. Read the article again.

And are you saying that we got into this cluster F by listening to Phil Greenspun, or other amateurs? It seems to me that the well-paid "experts" in finance and the media deserve most of the blame rather than internet people shooting their mouths off.

....bringing up a good point which is: why are people like Lawrence Summers, Paulson, Bernanke etc. expected to get us out of this mess when they CREATED it?

Things WILL get worse as our political system is unwilling to punish incompetence and the people who predicted this stuff would happen aren't being listened to now that its obvious they were right.

Presumably, we're just meant to go look all these things up at the Cato Institute.

Based on the article posted here on rent control the other day,it does indeed seem as though greenspun uses the same unsubstantiated assertion strategy for building arguments as does the cato institute. I guess I have to give him credit for being no worse than folks that get paid to write this crap.

One of the few problems the Cato people don't have is being strong, reasoned, effective debate opponents.

lol.I am not going to opine about their entire body of work. But if you think they never have the problem of which I speak then clearly you didnt read the rent control article which explains new york's and other big cities high rents on rent control. Whether you agree with rent control or not, this is an insane unsubstantiated assertion.

I read it, I disagreed with it, but it didn't seem insanely unsubstantiated, just wrong. For it to be insanely unsubstantiated, it would at the least need to be true that rent control was a stunning success, which it is not.

I disagree. He bases his argument on the idea that rent control causes high rents as demonstrated in places like NY. This is patently false in my opinion, but my opinion is not what counts. The reason I say it is unsubstantiated and therefore insane, is that he provided no argument for the idea that there is a causation between high rents and rent control. The author falls into the all too common trap of mapping a correlation to a causation. That may be a good strategy to throw red meat to right wingers, but it is not a well constructed argument.

Are we talking about the same article? In the one I remember, he backed his argument up with a survey of deviation from median rent in markets with and without rent control.

Yes, he observed a correlation. In this case, there's a very reasonable argument to be made against a causal relationship: cheap cities don't institute rent control.

While I disagree with the article, that argument is probably easy to respond to; there are relatively expensive cities that don't have rent control, and his measurements are deviation from median, not just the median rent itself.

Neither of those is an effective counter-argument:

1) The existence of expensive cities without rent control doesn't tell us anything about the effect of rent control on rent (cities can be expensive for lots of reasons unrelated to rent control), unless you do a study comparing roughly equivalent expensive cities, some with rent control, and some without. The author didn't do that -- he compared cities with rent control, to cities without, and found that cities with rent control are more expensive. This was bad experimental design.

2) His measurements found that the distributions around the median were different for expensive cities vs. inexpensive ones. But it doesn't really matter that he was comparing the shapes of the distributions, and not their medians, because one can reasonably expect that expensive cities will have a larger contingent of really expensive homes than inexpensive cities, even without the effect of rent control. For that matter, rent control might be the only thing giving the expensive cities a stock of inexpensive housing at all!

Again, for a proper experiment, the author needed to compare equivalently priced cities, varying only the factor of rent control. He didn't do that.