Text Ticker: Is the overly predicted life worth living?
Harvard political scientist Harvey Mansfield has a piece in the Weekly Standard which suggests that economists should enter a discourse of virtue. It’s a daring suggestion, one which would bring economic thought much closer to the humanities again and, in the process, away from the pretense of escaping communitarian conceptions of the good.
Thus the predictions of economists tend to give the impression that the economy can be predicted. Economists are intelligent people, well-connected and well-educated, gainfully employed in prestigious institutions. Although they rarely reach the top offices, they are often the top advisers to the top officers. So they seem to know what they are doing. They impart confidence in their predictions, which are often or mostly in the ballpark. Except when they are not, as at present. In a crisis the confidence they impart most of the time is exposed as overconfidence, a delusion that sets us up for surprise and disillusionment. We are not so surprised by the delusions of crowds and mobs–who does not know they are unreliable?–but that their delusions should be supported and promoted by scientists of the rank and caliber of economists might easily shake our confidence in the reliability of our elites and even of our scientific civilization.
Overconfidence in overcoming chance is the way of life recommended by economists. It is the way of life known as progress by liberals and as growth by conservatives, who are secretly united by overconfidence in their knowledge of the future which they describe diversely and call by different names. This recommended overconfidence transforms the predictions of economists into overall advice–not advice with a condition, such as if you want to get rich, do this, but advice on how to live while getting and being rich. Of course economics has been known as the dismal science because it confronts human necessities with the fact of scarcity, and in theories of overpopulation like that of Malthus, it may find that we will not get as much as we need. But it could also be called, whether dismal or promising, the triumphal or hubristic science for what it claims to be able to predict.
