Much To Be Humble About

In an NY Times "Room for Debate" on rethinking the way we teach economics, Jeffrey Miron titles his contribution "A Little Humility Would Help."

I think this is a case where the title is better than the post. Miron writes about a kind of predictive humility: we are not as good at predicting the future as we might have thought. I suppose economics could use some humility along these lines, but honestly it seems to me that economics was already reasonably humble when it came to predicting business cycles, financial booms and busts, etc.

Where economics has gone off the rails, I think, is its lack of humility about its methodology. Economics ignores vast areas of human knowledge and makes only token acknowledgment of the limitations of its models. I can't count the number of times I have heard people deploy economic arguments as though they are decisive, as though the only reason you would ever support, say, unionization is because you are untutored in economics.

That's the arrogance that needs to be purged from economics. Economists need to stop colonizing other disciplines, retrench, and seize the commanding heights of their own territory. Then they can tell themselves that they never had it so good.