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Concluding Notes
George Bernard Shaw wrote that if all economists were
laid end to end, they would not reach a conclusion. Though
there is a general perception that Shaw was right, and that
economists disagree about everything, there are in fact
substantial areas of agreement among economists. However,
there are no issues on which 100% of economists agree; there
are fringe positions on all issues (as there are in physics,
biology, geology, etc.). Most fringe positions are crackpot
ideas, and if you search the internet, you can find some of
them. A few are not crackpot ideas, but will become the
conventional wisdom of the future. As the introduction told
you, economics is a science, and as a science, everything
economists think they know is subject to alteration and
change. One hundred years from now economics textbooks will
be noticeably different from those of today.
Fields in which controlled experiments can be conducted
have much less disagreement than fields in which controlled
experiments cannot be conducted. There is a much larger body
of physics or chemistry about which there is little or no
disagreement than there is of economics. But the areas of
agreement in fields such as history, psychology, sociology,
and anthropology are not substantially larger than those in
economics, and may be smaller. Economics studies very
complex systems, systems that have interactions producing
unexpected consequences to many actions. Economists are
limited to using whatever data those systems provide, and
often the data they do provide is difficult to measure. If
economists could roll back history and rerun the 1930s (or
any other decade) five or six times, changing each time just
a few variables, the area of agreement among economists
would grow considerably. But they cannot. Disagreement will
never disappear in macroeconomics. But even if there are
sizable areas of disagreement, large areas about which
almost all economists agree can exist.
Copyright
Robert Schenk
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