Snake Oil, Anyone?

As anyone who knows me knows, I consider economics to be, at its very best, a pseudo-science, hiding its inadequacies behind a veil of obscurantist terminology and spurious statistical theory. No economic theory - and that is what all economics is: empirically unsubstantiated theory - has ever managed to predict or explain the way that economies actually work or why they often fail: they simply reflect, in obfuscated, stock terms, the symptoms of the disease after the patient is dead and six feet under. Economists reflect. They seldom influence any but the political elites who use their theories to justify their policies - viz the forty-five year disaster that is neo-liberal 'thinking'.

What economists certainly can't and don't do is predict the exact behaviour of an economy at any given point in time, even its moments of fatal criticality, ie. market crashes and hyperinflation: an economy is, in reality, a barely-damped feedback loop - no, rather a vast complex web of barely-damped feedback loops: aggregated variables piled up in an unsolvable  matrix of statistics - that tends for short periods toward stasis, before veering off towards complete instability, with the inevitable human - societal - consequences, that economic criticalities precipitate.

Economists are essentially vicarious observers of phenomena they can neither understand nor influence, except indirectly. Linguistics is not so dissimilar a discipline. I studied at postgraduate level, forty-five years ago, when the tablets of stone from God were passed down to Moses Noam Chomsky, in the form of Transformational Grammar. This was the gospel of  early 1980s linguistics. It has now been consigned to the dustbin of ill-informed junk theory, which is where most economic theories end up when their political expediency expires...