This is a great article although the stuff about Austrian economics and how economics will move left should be tossed. Mr. Kling should save those opinions for Cato.
Aside from that, I always wonder why we have never had a "Great Economic Project." In WWII we united scientists of all stripes to come together to build the atom bomb and more recently Obama launched the BRAIN initiative. Understanding how our economy works is, I'd say, as important as either one of those. Some project where the government can assemble the best minds in sociology, psychology, business, math, history and then use economists to help glue all of this together. Perhaps our way forward is not in coming across some new beautiful model but in building the ugliest, most glued-together piece of crap that happens to be (relatively) accurate and then simplifying it later.
'Aside from that, I always wonder why we have never had a "Great Economic Project."'
The nature of politics is such that if the government funded such a thing, the only acceptable outcome for it to come to is that the people funding it already had the correct model. The alternative is that the politicians funding it would have spent a lot of political capital to get that funding only to be told that they're wrong, probably wrong about everything.
On one level or another, even politicians realize that they might as well just cut out the middleman here and operate on the vigorous and loud assumption that they are already correct about economics and anyone who disagrees is the literal embodiment of evil.
A manhattan project for economics would likely cause more human misery than the invention of atomic weaponry. The market is not your friend. The market is highly advanced social technology that bribes and coerces people into sacrificing the things they care about to further the goals of the state.
There's a reason why Western-style market capitalism has taken over the world. You aren't anywhere near remotely worried enough about it.
Aside from that, I always wonder why we have never had a "Great Economic Project." In WWII we united scientists of all stripes to come together to build the atom bomb and more recently Obama launched the BRAIN initiative. Understanding how our economy works is, I'd say, as important as either one of those. Some project where the government can assemble the best minds in sociology, psychology, business, math, history and then use economists to help glue all of this together. Perhaps our way forward is not in coming across some new beautiful model but in building the ugliest, most glued-together piece of crap that happens to be (relatively) accurate and then simplifying it later.