The economist is to an economy what the psychiatrist is to our psyche. And in the same way the latter pretends to know what constitutes the "right" kind of mind, dispensing as many explanations for what they diagnose as wrong as drugs to fix the errors, so the former pretends to the same thing with a countries economy. But in truth, neither really understand either one, since an economy is simply the result of all human minds, and even the simplest single human mind is still an infinite universe unto itself, perhaps 99.9% of which we either know nothing about, or have no real concrete understanding of.
The human mind, after all, is a chaotic universe of consciousness and subconsciousness, both of which exist in perpetual flux, reflexively reacting to any infinite array of environmental factors from without, as well as chemical, emotional, and psychological elements from within. An economy is simply a macrocosm of some ever changing number of interactions between those minds, that the economist thinks they can reduce to some numerical "science," from which they can deduce something about the nature of "economics" the same way a physicist uses math to deduce something about the nature of the physical universe.
Overall, both tend to think their disciplines can truly understand something definitive about their respective fields, one by studying the tree and the other the interactions of the forest, yet each are selling their perspective and their discipline in the same way a priest wishes to convince his parishioners that his particular religion is the surest means of improving the world and avoid eternal damnation in the next life.
That all three necessarily rely on people's willingness to simply "believe" in both the validity of their respective fields of study, and the competence and insight that the particular disciple of that field is selling, illustrates how truly foolish it is of us to elevate our penchant for simply "believing" in things, to the level of the highest virtue of all. Indeed, we even qualify such a willingness to "believe" - in say a God or a religion - as a "gift of faith" or a "gift from God."
What's interesting about all three systems of thinking - economics, psychiatry, and religion - is that each has just as many reasons, and just as much evidence, to simply "believe" their ideas must necessarily be "true," as the other two. In fact, each equally enjoys pointing out the splinter in the eye of the other two almost as much as they enjoy denying that the splinter they see in other people's eyes is simply a projection of the beam in their own.
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