Assume a cow is a uniform sphere of milk... And sometimes that's how economics feels. Absolutely agree with your comment. Coincidentally, I was thinking abou

Assume a cow is a uniform sphere of milk... And sometimes that's how economics feels. Absolutely agree with your comment. Coincidentally, I was thinking about this yesterday as I watched one of many economists explain the market on TV. At some level I feel they grab onto one of N plausible ideas and go with it. They have to say something, right? After all, they are economists. I haven't failed to notice that there are very few (not one?) massively wealthy economists. That has to say something. If you look at the people who have made fortunes they are all practitioners, not theorists. In other words, they "touch and feel" the economy every second of the day for years and understand how it moves, at least at the relevant micro level, to gain advantages. This one thing has always bothered me about economics. Lots of economists publishing books and claiming all sorts of events and effects and none of them have significant financial success to show for their understanding of the economy. Fake Jedi's who talk about the force but can't use it. I'd like to see an economist on TV who starts their opinion of the economy in a Trump-esque way with: "I am very rich. I understand the economy and because of that I make $400 million per year". In terms of using models and simulations, well, we do a lot of FEA, mostly for thermal and fluid dynamics. I had a poster printed and hung in the lab. It reads: "The only person who believes the results of these simulations is the one who wrote the code". I stole that from my friends in aero who always talk about how careful you have to be with aero "codes", particularly at the extremes (low and high RN). Of course, FEA has gotten better and better over the years, yet it is true that you have to be very careful with how you interpret results. That's why we verify expected results experimentally by building a prototype every N variants of a design based on various criteria. I remember thermal management design to cool over 1,000 Watts of high power LED's concentrated within a small surface area. It took eight months of FEA and dozens of prototypes to get it right. Some of the proto's didn't behave anything like the simulation. Some behaved better. It's an art. And so my point is that we are likely to have a new crop of economists who will base their opinions on simulations without, perhaps, understanding just how imperfect they can be.