> The mainstream camp however, thought otherwise and most of the world followed their advice.
Not the mainstream -- a vocal minority. Ordinary Macro 101 textbooks predicted the consequences of the policies in the the US and Europe pretty accurately.
This. If you look at the right ideas of Macro 101, the success rate is pretty high. Bailouts, demand-side policy, properly applied monetary stimulus, expectations management and confidence. If you look at famous wrong ideas, their failure rate has been pretty high. Austerity, strong currencies, lazy ZIRP stimulus, do-nothing policy, inflation paranoia. What is true in macro before the recession has become more true. The econ pundits who focused on these Macro 101 truths have been mostly right, with the monetary guys being perhaps a little more right than the fiscal stimulus guys. This should not be surprising as the things that are "true" in econ are such by virtue of hundreds of years of examination and highly reasonable philosophy, which anyone who's bothered to study econ would know.
Most people who say "econ is not a science" have had little to no experience with people who conduct economics as a science. I understand the cargo-cultists and pundits are much louder voices, but someone good at "science" shouldn't lazily examine the most shallow voices and use that to conclude deep things about a field of study.
There's cargo cult science, and then there's cargo cult scientific criticism.
>This. If you look at the right ideas of Macro 101, the success rate is pretty high. Bailouts, demand-side policy, properly applied monetary stimulus, expectations management and confidence.
This is ridiculous. Economies recover from recessions and "Macro 101" people claim victory. But economies recover from recessions if you do nothing. Or you implement austerity measures.
>Most people who say "econ is not a science" have had little to no experience with people who conduct economics as a science.
People who "conduct economics as a science" have little or no connection to reality. They have grossly oversimplified models that fail to make meaningful predictions and congratulate themselves on the accuracy of their models in the complete absence of evidence.
Talk about cargo cult science. Economics isn't a science. It's just a way to fit the world into your political template.
Perhaps your economy won't recover to its former glory, like the way Japan's didn't. Then you'll have at least one first-hand empirical data point, even if you're unable to learn from observing others.
Not the mainstream -- a vocal minority. Ordinary Macro 101 textbooks predicted the consequences of the policies in the the US and Europe pretty accurately.