Tuesday, March 17, 2009

Interview With Nassim Nicholas Taleb - washingtonpost.com:

You're a fierce critic of the entire field of economics. Don't economists know anything?

You have close to a million people out there in economic life. How many people saw the extent of what could happen in this financial crisis? Some people said we'd have a problem of too much leverage, but very few saw the potential total impact that could come out of it. They didn't see the cascading effects that can be produced by a complex system.

Years ago, I noticed one thing about economics, and that is that economists didn't get anything right. I wanted to find out the reason. They would say their models are not perfect. But data show that you do much worse using their models than you would without them. It's a bull [expletive] science.

10:18 AM