What Economists Are Not — And Shouldn’t Try to Be

Article by Carmen Elena Dorobăț at Mises Institute today.

In my opinion, economists are politically-motivated behavioral scientists – sociologists that crunch numbers. Their soft science of behavior observation does not give them an ability to plan economies, create monetary policy, or allocate societal resources. While they may make predictions, they cannot control an economy, which is the aggregate of billions of individual human decisions regarding their own resources via complex value judgments, the individual responses to subjectively-determined incentives and disincentives, the movement of services and products in numbers and ways that cannot be finitely understood by anyone. Economists – just another set of snake oil salesmen. Dorobat’s article supports this view.