There's a specific mental trap -- I'll call this "scientism" -- that a lot of comments here are rapidly falling into. It's in treating macroeconomics as a "sol

There's a specific mental trap -- I'll call this "scientism" -- that a lot of comments here are rapidly falling into. It's in treating macroeconomics as a "solved" problem, or putting too much faith in specific studies or sentences. That's not at all the proper way to look at macroeconomics. Our economy is unimaginably complex -- it's full of hundreds and millions of moving parts, with each single part (the human brain) driven by an even more complex system with hundreds of billions of parts (neurons). All of these parts are re-orienting themselves with new data in real time. What Sam is trying to say here, is that we don't know if these trends are "good" or "bad", or if they'll lead to bad outcomes or not, or in what time frame this will occur. All we know now -- and this I agree with -- is that something in our economy has changed permanently. And this should be a good cause to worry, or at least, should be taken as a call to arms to economists everywhere to try and figure out why our models aren't working as well as they used to. "Too large a proportion of recent "mathematical" economics are mere concoctions, as imprecise as the initial assumptions they rest on, which allow the author to lose sight of the complexities and interdependencies of the real world in a maze of pretentious and unhelpful symbols." - John Maynard Keynes