Business without economists : an irreverent guide / William J. Hudson

Includes bibliographical references and index.

1. The Demand for Gurus -- 2. The Rise and Fall of a Soft Science -- 3. Economic Complexity and Circularity -- 4. Economic Models versus Reality -- 5. Why Economics Doesn't Work- Summary and Objections -- 6. The Nobel Committee versus President Reagan -- 7. Changing Our Outlook -- 8. Irreverence, Nonsense, and Myth -- 9. Quantitative History -- 10. Narrative History -- 11. Critical History -- 12. Graphic Distortion -- 13. Clarity versus Jargon -- 14. Monitoring the Front Page -- 15. Consensus and the Sequence of Ideas -- 16. Conclusion.

Business leaders routinely make more reliable forecasts than paid economists do. Many other people besides business leaders are also good at forecasting, and their forecasts are almost always better than the ones made by "experts," especially when the experts work in large teams and use the latest, most sophisticated computers. In other words, economics doesn't work. The evidence appears daily. Economic forecasts are made and published. We read the reports and outlooks. But by tomorrow, we see that yesterday's forecasts are wrong. Then the process repeats itself. If we are among those who prosper, we become skeptical about economics. We can see from firsthand experience that it doesn't work, and we develop our own methods of making forecasts that are more reliable than those we find in the news or those we can buy privately from the economic experts. But even though we become skeptical, we seldom say so. Nobody does, except an occasional journalist. It would be impolite for us to say that economics doesn't work. Economists are among the most respected of all our public figures. We may think, "Economics doesn't work, but it should. Maybe when computers are sophisticated enough, the Science of Economics will figure everything out."