One of the favorite activities of politicians and journalists is that of improvise economists: the former, developing mostly disastrous multi-year plans; the latter, explaining and praising the aforementioned plans without having understood them.
Economics is a complex subject, dealing with issues in which the variables are practically infinite. If we presented a system of equations with an infinite number of variables to the best mathematician, even he would have some difficulty solving it. Yet we continue with the preparation of plans multi-year with which public money (i.e. other people’s money) is spent to impose ideological choices which have more often than not proved unsuccessful in the course of economic history. Perfectist politicians and economists who every time propose recipes with which they aspire to replace the Eternal Father.
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He wrote Sergio Ricossa in his introduction to the volume What is produced, how and for whom (Giappichelli Editore): “We must not forget that economic science is relatively young: Adam Smith, who is considered one of the first great economists, lived about two centuries ago, when other sciences were already mature. The most advanced are the experimental sciences, those in which it is possible to carry out experiments in the laboratory. A physicist who wants to check how much a metal bar expands due to heat can easily vary the temperature as desired, and nothing else.
But an economist who wants to investigate how the number of children affects the wealth and on the poverty of families, cannot carry out a similar experiment. The size of a family cannot be changed arbitrarily, and even if it were changed, time would pass and a thousand other causes which influence wealth and poverty would change together and without the possibility of control. The Economist he is forced to study only what history offers him, and to study it outside the laboratories, in a very complicated and ever-changing reality, where all the causes are mixed together, and it is difficult to say which causes are the most important and which are less”.
Different eras have produced different recipes, some of which have generated dictatorial regimes, hunger and backwardness, while others have created technological, economic and social development: “To anyone who studies the history of economic thought, it is evident that it has gone through different phases and eras. Each era has been characterized by a particular choice of problems to analyze and by a particular set of answers provided to them (or, as they say, by a particular “paradigm”); in the face of the predominant positions, there have been at all times minority positionsrepresented by dissident thinkers and heretics, and sometimes the heretics of one age have become the orthodox of the next” (Ibid).
We do not look at the actual growth produced previously, we instead continue to plan an idyllic future on the basis of ideological chimeras, hoping to fold a complex reality into the simplified meshes of recipes for “beautiful souls” (nothing things, such as save the planet’s climate imposing, on a continental scale, the purchase of car electrical with relative bonus, or abolish poverty by decree by arbitrarily distributing other people’s money, or establish the prices of goods based on the moods of the reference categories of the politician in question, etc.).
And instead, punctually, the more they created illusions, the more they produced poverty, backwardness, debt and crazy spending devastating state budgets and generating inflation, and more are re-proposed as perfect formulas for creating heaven on earth. Governments and supranational structures are always working to commit enormous quantities of public money collected from tax-paying subjects, financing plans multi-year which almost always end up proving largely unachievable, but which allow us to continue to justify the existence of apparatuses and bureaucrats who live off this.
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