But rational expectations is just "people make error of random size and magnitude when predicting stuff". It's an absence of auxiliary assumptions about strategy, that's more compatible with complex emergent behaviour or people following a range of heuristics than the various forms of [implicit] consumption/production/etc function that preceded them. Ratex isn't "there's a single rational strategy", it's "these alternative specifications rely on a single fundamentally irrational strategy". You can still get path dependent outcomes with ratex models tending towards equilibria, just like many economists have managed to build many simplistic and wrong models of human behaviour with other specifications of expectation.
Anyway, epistemological agnosticism about outcomes is arguably much more compatible with the laissez-faire positions you seem to hate the most. If responses to and outcomes from public policy are unknowable, why do anything?
The classical physics analogy fits my position so perfectly I'm pretty sure I've used it before. Sure, Newton's theory of classical mechanics has no concept of subatomic particles and quarks simply don't behave like it suggests. But just because it's oversimplification at best and fundamentally wrong in other areas, and careless physics costs lives doesn't mean "caring about stuff falling down" and handwaving about complexity theory will build better bridges than the gravity-obsessed professional engineers you've confined to the cruise ship.
Right but you have the protagonists and antagonists in your metaphor reversed.
The academic economists are the ones that claim to be professional engineers but keep building bridges that fall down while everyone keeps screaming they have no idea what they are doing.
The Midwest‘s jobs empty out, the former Soviet Union is plunged into violence, the top 1% capture nearly all the productivity gains from the digital revolution, entire generations are unable to house themselves, pay for school, or raise children. Yet these assholes keep saying just trust me and let’s try more “free markets.”
>>Yet these assholes keep saying just trust me and let’s try more “free markets.”
People don't listen to economists, and it's not "free markets" that are being tried. You're raging against a system where market rights have been increasingly encroached upon over the last century, as a result of politically instituted government interventions, that according to basic economics, reduce productivity growth, exacerbate income inequality, or both.
To say nothing of the rapid expansion of the regulatory bureaucracy, and the barriers to competition it creates for major private sector incumbents, and highly paid consultants/lawyers/lobbyists who know how to navigate it.
2. The rapid increase in land-use restrictions in the major high-productivity population centers, which according to many analyses, has massively increased income inequality, while inhibiting productivity growth. E.g. this study estimates that reducing land-use restrictions in just three cities: New York, San Francisco and San Jose would increase GDP by 36.3 percent:
Except you know full well that you've constructed a straw man here, and professional economists are not all saying "let's try free markets".
Although that would be the logical response to concluding that modelling public policy outcomes is impossible so government should just give up trying, which is why the Koch brothers have invested so much money in promoting that view...
Anyway, epistemological agnosticism about outcomes is arguably much more compatible with the laissez-faire positions you seem to hate the most. If responses to and outcomes from public policy are unknowable, why do anything?
The classical physics analogy fits my position so perfectly I'm pretty sure I've used it before. Sure, Newton's theory of classical mechanics has no concept of subatomic particles and quarks simply don't behave like it suggests. But just because it's oversimplification at best and fundamentally wrong in other areas, and careless physics costs lives doesn't mean "caring about stuff falling down" and handwaving about complexity theory will build better bridges than the gravity-obsessed professional engineers you've confined to the cruise ship.