Is the Dominance of Economics History?

A couple of friends and colleagues have alerted me to a recent Financial Times piece by Gideon Rachman, urging folks to “sweep economists off their throne.”

The basic insight is that economists often model things with the claim that our models can inform the future.  He suggests we are more like historians than physicists, and it’s right time we admitted it already.

With the exception of a few deluded Marxists, historians know that their work cannot be used to predict the future. History can suggest lessons and parallels and provide wisdom – but what it cannot do is provide a sociological equivalent of the laws of physics. Yet this seems to be the aspiration of many economists, who notoriously suffer from “physics envy”.

In our corner, we have The Undercover Economist, Tim Harford, with a robust defense of the good guys, pointing out that there is more to economics than predicting recessions.  In fact, it’s not even clear that the profession pretends that this is of much consequence to “what economics is” (see here for elaboration).

Though, even as a staunch supporter, Harford cannot bring himself to defend macroeconomic, conceding that “macroeconomic models have proved fairly useless.”