There is a great line at the end of this article that says quite simply – “Economics is too important to be left to the Economists…” I’ve always attempted to describe successful Economics that is deeply considered, and empirically based – that it be viewed as applied philosophy. Intricate and coherent ideas, working with society rather than attempting to fit the models ex poste, and justifying anomalies through being at the tail end of the distribution curve, and therefore potentially not of equal relevance – when of course, often the models are specified or insufficiently detailed to calibrate for the anomaly….
So, how to proceed? Stop trying to model everything? That might not actually be a bad starting point… I wouldn’t expand on this too much here, but it does not diminish us intellectually to try and explain an idea using words rather than formula. Philosophy itself
managed to convey the profoundest contemplations of life, using words. I also don’t feel that we shouldn’t *not* try to model this complexity – look at weather forecasting! In the last 20 years with the presence of supercomputers, weather forecasting is far more accurate than it ever used to be and looks at similarly complex interplay of “Factors”, humidity, temperature, air pressure etc… Physics itself can discern the likelihood of the existence of life, or the possibility therein, 10 million light years away, through the utilisation of spectrum analysis.
It’s not that modelling isn’t astonishingly powerful. It’s simply that policymakers and political leaders and the electorate who put them there, can’t readily understand this stuff. Who can? There are perhaps a couple of hundred people in the world that can do this spectrum analysis… and yet human society, as is, not yet modelled, is not hugely less complex.
Our awareness of interdependence is greater now than at any time in the past, and so the nature of power in institutions; the rationale for continuing a war rather than striking a peace deal; the simple fact that the price of renewables doesn’t care whether Trump believes in climate change – Economics can, and should, seek to explain all of this. Behavioural Economics, of course, introduced powerful psychological thinking into the discipline. Politics has always been there. I’ve been arguing for a long time for a greater awareness of sociology and anthropology to also be integrated. When the homes of Hollywood’s elite burned in Los Angeles recently, this was quite an argument that you might be able to build a very tall fence on the Mexican border, but climate change isn’t going to respect that. Even if you build it higher. Economics, if it is to remain useful, needs to strive to explain these things to those who can effect change.
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2026/feb/10/rethinking-economics-student-academic-organisation-changing-education
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