Korektoj

I’m an economist.

Yeah, I belong to that group of people who are supposed to know more than everyone else about what’s going on now in the world.

We, the economists, are the ones who know best.

If you don’t understand why we do what we do, don’t worry, you’re an ignorant and, yes, I know that a democracy means you have the right to say what you think and vote, even if you are a fool and decide to vote for someone just because you like his smile or his voice.

Luckily, we economist are objective, aren’t we?

Well, that’s what I’m going to discuss here.

Are we rational and predictable?

Can our actions been expressed as numbers?

If so, then we only have to find those numbers, the so-called constants, that would help us predict our future actions and increase our economies’ efficiency to their limit.

Because there are some economists who think we are unpredictable as individuals though predictable when considered as a whole.

Mathematics is the key here.

If you present your ideas along with some figures, then you can say you’re objective, as it is the figures the ones that talk and not you.

Numbers give you something that we, the economist, have always dreamed of, the feeling that Economy is like any other science and as prestigious as medicine, chemistry or physics.

There is a complex of inferiority among us that hasn’t been got over yet.

We want to be like them, the scientists, so people would hear us and read us with the same respect they do when they listen to people like Stephen Hawking. But we can’t.

It’s impossible.

We can’t do experiments like a real scientist does.

We can’t conduct the same experiment twice, each time we analyze a phenomenon we do it studying markets that are different one from another and comparing different periods.

You can’t dream of identifying the real causes of a phenomenon because you can’t actually conduct a proper experiment.

We can only try to learn from what history teaches us, and hope we got it right.

So if you go to university and study Economy, you’re probably going to get the impression you are learning something objective, real science, and you will go on thinking the same way as long as you don’t read anything else apart from the text your teachers made you read.

Mathematics, of course, will help you believe that economic theory is fully developed and solid.

Doubts will begin as soon as you start listening to others economists-not teachers- with some respect, I mean, without insulting them out of hand, not making any effort to question your own ideas.

If you do listen and start thinking by yourself, then you may realize that the theory you learned was more subjective than you thought and you were all along a man of faith and not a scientist.

Anyway, you don’t even need to be an economist to understand what I am talking about.

I’m sure you have heard a few experts making predictions about the stock market or the evolution of the current economic crisis.

Think about it for a second and draw you’re own conclusions.

So keep this in mind, Economy is not a science, there are some fundamental principles which we can say they actually work, but we don’t know more than most people do, just we look as if we do.

Luckily, apart from economic theory, we learn some other useful things at university.