When Christopher Nolan was promoting his previous film Interstellar, he made the casual observation that “Take a field like economics for example. [Unlike physics] you have real material things and it can’t predict anything. It’s always wrong.” There is a lot more truth in that statement than most academic economists would like to admit. Alan Jay Levinovitz recently put forth the provocative argument that economics is “The New Astrology.”He notes that “surveys indicate that economists see their discipline as ‘the most scientific of the social sciences.’” But unfortunately “real-world history...

When Christopher Nolan was promoting his previous film Interstellar, he made the casual observation that “Take a field like economics for example. [Unlike physics] you have real material things and it can’t predict anything. It’s always wrong.” There is a lot more truth in that statement than most academic economists would like to admit. Alan Jay Levinovitz recently put forth the provocative argument that economics is “The New Astrology.”He notes that “surveys indicate that economists see their discipline as ‘the most scientific of the social sciences.’” But unfortunately “real-world history...