"One problem with
economics is that it is necessarily focused on policy, rather than discovery of
fundamentals. Nobody really cares much about economic data except as a guide to
policy: economic phenomena do not have the same intrinsic fascination for us as
the internal resonances of the atom or the functioning of the vesicles and
other organelles of a living cell. We judge economics by what it can produce.
As such, economics is rather more like engineering than physics, more practical
than spiritual. (...)
My belief is that
economics is somewhat more vulnerable than the physical sciences to models
whose validity will never be clear, because the necessity for approximation is
much stronger than in the physical sciences, especially given that the models
describe people rather than magnetic resonances or fundamental particles.
People can just change their minds and behave completely differently. They even
have neuroses and identity problems, complex phenomena that the field of
behavioral economics is finding relevant to understanding economic outcomes."
