By Neil Sinhababu So I'm just Joe Philosophy Professor watching Krugman & DeLong vs. the Chicago Schoolmen about whether we need fiscal stimulus, with Nobel Prize winning economists* on either side. And I'm thinking: How many fields are there in which a big practical question pops up and the Nobel-level guys are on opposite sides yelling at each other? It's not that there isn't disagreement in other scientific areas, but the level of disagreement we're looking at here is something really different. They aren't dickering over some minor proposal or detail. They're talking about whether or not we should dump nearly a trillion dollars' worth of stimulus money into the economy. And it isn't a question that should be sitting at the far cutting edge of research, like how many dimensions your string theory needs to have. The raison d'etre of the discipline is to deal with stuff like this. I'm not saying that individual economists are sleeping on the job -- there are legitimate reasons why this is difficult stuff to do. We have a vanishingly small amount of historical data to work with, and economists can't go into the lab, start depressions in twenty Erlenmeyer flasks, and dump in different stimulus packages to see what works. But that in itself is a reason to be wary of math-heavy, evidence-light economic models and the pronouncements that they produce.
