Economists are supposed to monitor and analyze the economy, warn us if risks are getting out of hand, and advise us on how to make things runs more effectively, right?
Well, even though that's what most people expect from economists, it's not at all how they see their role, warns CFA and and behavioral economist Daniel Nevins. Economists, he cautions, are modelers. They pursue academic lines of thought in order to make their models more perfect.
They live in a universe of equations and presumptions about equilibrium states and other chimerical mathematical perfections that don't exist in real life. In short, they are the wrong people to advise us, Nevins claims, as they have no clue how the imperfect world we live in actually works.
In his book Economics For Independent Thinkers, he argues that we need a new, more accurate and useful way of studying the economy.
- Source, Peak Prosperity
