Nobody knows how “the economy” works

I had no faith in bourgeois economics. I went to graduate school to study Marxian economics.

My god, Das Kapital, in three volumes, is almost 800 pages. There is a posthumous fourth volume (Theories of Surplus Value) that Frederick Engels put together from Marx’s final notes and, printed as another three volumes, totals another thousand pages. The last line of the last volume says: “The system is pretty complex.”

I was subjected to 479 models of how the economy works. And that was just in the two years I hung around to get a Master’s degree. The poor souls who went for their Ph.D. were subjected to many more.

The economy can’t be understood because there are so many “exogenous factors” (like: human politics, human behavior, human irrationality). And “externalities.” And epicycles. And unicorns.

https://www.nytimes.com/2021/10/01/upshot/inflation-economy-analysis.html

It is vivid evidence that macroeconomics, despite the thousands of highly intelligent people over centuries who have tried to figure it out, remains, to an uncomfortable degree, a black box. The ways that millions of people bounce off one another — buying and selling, lending and borrowing, intersecting with governments and central banks and businesses and everything else around us — amount to a system so complex that no human fully comprehends it.