Well I’ve been posting a variety of gloomy predictions from economists and others who have recently turned to the dark, or Eeyore, side. These are, to an extent, concerning because they indicate that the consensus may be starting to shift and my observation is that the consensus of economists is generally wrong about the future. Economics is not a science - it does not produce falsifiable theories in the Popperian sense and does not use the scientific method. It is based on a variety of sects - “Chicago school”, “Austrian”, “Keynesian” and so forth which produce competing theories about how the world works. In the absence of the scientific method, the competing claims of these sects are never resolved. So we should not be surprised when economists do not produce much useful information about the future.

The scary part is that government, always terrified of markets which by their nature are opposed to the rent-seeking nature of politics, turns over major policy decisions to economists rather than allow markets to make the decisions. So we have BOGSAT (Bunch Of Guys Sitting Around A Table) at the Fed blowing monetary bubbles based on their religious belief that printing money somehow has benefits other than making the money out there worth less. Sigh.