There are THOUSANDS of critiques out there of the form “Economic theory can’t be trusted because economic theory analyses make assumptions that can’t be proven and are often wrong, and conclusions are often sensitive to assumptions.” Really, this is a very standard and generic critique, and of course it is quite wrong, as such a critique can be equally made against any area of theory whatsoever, in any field.
But of course, it can’t be used against them all equally. Physics is so good you can send a probe to a planet millions of miles away. But trying to achieve a practical result in economics is largely guesswork.
Aside from the arguments we made about modelling unawareness, I don’t think we were claiming that econ theory wouldn’t be useful. We argue that new agency models could tell us about the levels of rents extracted by AI agents; just that i) we can’t infer much from existing models because they model different situations and are brittle, ii) that models won’t shed light on phenomena beyond what they are trying to model
There are THOUSANDS of critiques out there of the form “Economic theory can’t be trusted because economic theory analyses make assumptions that can’t be proven and are often wrong, and conclusions are often sensitive to assumptions.” Really, this is a very standard and generic critique, and of course it is quite wrong, as such a critique can be equally made against any area of theory whatsoever, in any field.
But of course, it can’t be used against them all equally. Physics is so good you can send a probe to a planet millions of miles away. But trying to achieve a practical result in economics is largely guesswork.
Aside from the arguments we made about modelling unawareness, I don’t think we were claiming that econ theory wouldn’t be useful. We argue that new agency models could tell us about the levels of rents extracted by AI agents; just that i) we can’t infer much from existing models because they model different situations and are brittle, ii) that models won’t shed light on phenomena beyond what they are trying to model
“models are brittle” and “models are limited” ARE the generic complaints I pointed to.