Why bother?

Economics is dismal, yes.  But a science?

Our tutoring consultant spends his working time mostly on mathematics, with a large dose of Chemistry and Physics.  In these he has an extensive background, going well beyond anything High School students are likely to see.  He also helps with Spanish and French, having a reasonable command of these languages, as well as a few other topics that come up from time to time.  But lately he has been asked to go rather outside his formal background and help with Economics.

A few years ago there were no tutors at his center who had ever had a class in the subject: a lack of supply; while there were many students: a great demand.  So obedient to economic laws, our tutor set himself to learn at least as much as he needed to help with the AP course.  He spent some time with the textbook and practice tests, and was of some use.  But when a teacher came in with a little experience in the subject, our tutor was glad to pass the duty to him.  Unfortunately, that one recently left.  So our tutor went back to the books.

Economics has been called “the dismal science” for reasons anyone can understand.  Dealing with events that impoverish millions and forces that put great wealth and poverty side-by-side, it certainly earns the adjective “dismal.”  But is it a science?  Going through the ideas and “laws” as presented to introductory students, our tutor can always think of counterexamples and situations in which they don’t actually work.  In part, this is a result of the necessary simplifications of an introductory course.  But when the textbook presents serious disagreement among experts as to what the cause of this recession (for instance) actually is, one is entitled to wonder whether they know anything at all.

Well, Economics is never going to be Physics.  It deals with complicated systems that cannot actually be isolated from each other.  The island country producing only potatoes or pastry is a fiction, far more distant from reality than the Ideal Gas Law is from room-temperature carbon dioxide.  And it deals with people, who do weird things for incomprehensible reasons, or none at all.  Any attempt to make sense of this area is going to be messy.

And the alternative, to give up trying to find rules, means essentially to “suffer the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune” passively as in Medieval times.  Except that that won’t happen.  People will always look for a scapegoat, and are very good at finding the wrong one.

There are indeed signs that something has been learned in the Dismal Science, and even applied.  Almost unnoticed, sometime in the 1990s a majority of people were more than a crop-failure year away from famine, for the first time in human history.  And some of the economic shocks of the past decades did not turn into disasters, as has happened many times in the past.  At least some of the material in the Economics course is true.

Getting people to apply it is another matter.