Quote:
Originally Posted by LubeMaster77
Of what little I know about economics,
|
I think that you hit the nail on the head right off the bat. Economics is not a trivial subject since in encompasses facets of psychology, finance, and math, especially statistics. From talking with people, I don't get a sense that most even understand the concepts and ramifications of the famous supply and demand curves. It gets quite a bit more complex when you get into micro- and macro- economic situations and eventually quite a bit more sophisticated when you get to higher level stuff like gaming theory. One of the underlying constants that I've observed about economics from top to bottom is the systems and affects will change and evolve as a result of the intelligent creature (specifically us) who is being analyzed.
So you can push the throttle over and over again on a car and reliably observe that the engine speed goes up. If you were to repeatedly apply a stimulus (let's leave BHO out of this for a moment) of some sort to an economic system, you would discover that the results would change with every application, and in fact the system might "learn" what you are doing and actually anticipate the application of a stimulus -- resulting in the reaction happening even without a stimulus, or of no reaction happening at all.
Good economists are like good engineers --
very smart. The problem is that there are quite a few of both groups who are essentially worthless, and it can be difficult for the laymen to tell the difference between the two.