“ECONOMISTS WON´T PREDICT THE NEXT CRASH, BECAUSE THEY CAN´T”
Economics is not a science that provides you with the means for forecasting the future. As Ludwig von Mises puts it: “This is not to say that future human actions are utterly unpredictable. They can, in a certain way, be anticipated to some extent. But the methods applied in such anticipations, and their scope, are logically and epistemologically entirely different from those applied in anticipating natural events, and from their scope, Mises’ statement might require some further explanation.
Rightly understood, economics is the science of human action, or, to be more precise, economics is about the logic of human action. Its “Archimedean Point” is the irrefutably true statement that humans act”. The latter cannot be denied without causing a logical contradiction. If you argue “humans cannot act”, you act, and you would thus contradict your own statement. From the self-evidently true statement “humans act” we can deduce, or unfold, further true statements.
To give some examples: Human action, which is always the action of an individual, is purposeful; action requires means to attain goals; means are scarce; human action presupposes the category of means and ends, that is causality; time is an indispensable means for action; human action implies time preference and thus the originary interest rate (and both are positive, they cannot be zero, let alone be negative); the law of marginal utility is also logically implied in the statement “humans act”.
These (and other) statements are logically implied in the proposition that “humans act”. Any economic theory that contradicts the implications of the concept of human action must raise serious doubts as to its truth value. For instance, an economic theory in which human action does not take time, or in which human action is not constrained by definite time preference and a positive originary interest rate, can be dismissed as being logically false (as unrealistic, as unworldly madness).
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