From: Warren Smith <warren.wds@gmail.com>

Now normally, a scientific theory that is often off by a factor of 10^10000 would not be considered ultra good and worthy of a Nobel prize. But this is economics, where the scientific standards are a little different.

Huh, I was just reading about that... "On the one hand the still recent establishment of the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Science marks a significant step in the process by which, in the opinion of the general public, economics has been conceded some of the dignity and prestige of the physical sciences. On the other hand, the economists are at this moment called upon to say how to extricate the free world from the serious threat of accelerating inflation which, it must be admitted, has been brought about by policies which the majority of economists recommended and even urged governments to pursue. We have indeed at the moment little cause for pride: as a profession we have made a mess of things." ... "But the effects on policy of the more ambitious constructions have not been very fortunate and I confess that I prefer true but imperfect knowledge, even if it leaves much indetermined and unpredictable, to a pretence of exact knowledge that is likely to be false. " ... "Yet the confidence in the unlimited power of science is only too often based on a false belief that the scientific method consists in the application of a ready-made technique, or in imitating the form rather than the substance of scientific procedure, as if one needed only to follow some cooking recipes to solve all social problems. It sometimes almost seems as if the techniques of science were more easily learnt than the thinking that shows us what the problems are and how to approach them." "The Pretence of Knowledge," Fredrick Hayek's 1974 Nobel Prize Lecture http://www.nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/economics/laureates/1974/hayek-lectur... As in many fields, not all of economics, only 95%, is crap. --Steve