I would love to see economics reparameterized in terms of it being a social network, with nodes and links, and then trying to measure how much the network is cl

I would love to see economics reparameterized in terms of it being a social network, with nodes and links, and then trying to measure how much the network is clustered or more un-clustered, the power relations between central and peripheral nodes (rulers and workers), and how that affects total network efficiency and how that affects inequality. And how resources flow between nodes and how when network connections break (people lose jobs or other business relationships) it can cascade through the network, and how the clusteredness affects how much and how fast it cascades. That is probably where the business cycle comes from imho. It just seems like nobody is looking at the problem from the right perspective. Then once you have a model with realistic qualitative behaviors- once you can identify the important variables like clusteredness and inequality, identify constraints and artificial forcings like government programs, then you can try to measure those variables in the real world and you might be able to make some near term projections that have actual predictive power. You could also make some predictions of how new government programs will impact things you care about like total productivity, how precarious or robust each individual's situation might be (do people have second chances or do they collapse into homelessness after one bad decision or accident), what the baseline economic outcome is (do we have people starving), etc. Right now I really don't feel like the state of the field of economics is advanced to the point where anybody is able to apply economics to problems we care about in any kind of rigorous way. After the fact you can always find some economist that will say "I predicted this" but you can also find 99 others who didn't predict it. And the people who get put in charge of the federal reserve are always one of the other 99. In fact I get the distinct impression that nobody in a position of power actually cares whether economics produces reliable intelligence. After the year 2000 bubble, after the financial collapse, nobody in a position of authority at that moment should have ever held a government job again. But yet here we are. (Same thing goes with the people who said that the Iraq war would pay for itself and that Afghanistan would be quick and easy- why do those people still have jobs?? But that's a tangent.) We are so used to catastrophic incompetence that we can't imagine any other situation.