I presume you mean that m is usually positively correlated with p over some unspecified time horizon?
A problem I often find with economic truisms is that they tend to carefully ignore the time component. Over a short enough time horizon this is clearly untrue. Over a long enough one it's pretty much tautological. Market theory has a similar property.
> if you print too much money, you will get inflation
Again, usually. Hasn't really been happening over the last few years in the US and Europe. Presumably we just wait for some arbitrary long period until inflation starts to rise again? Does the theory tell us how long?
So it's not that economics can't make predictions. It's just that they're often not useful predictions. It is quite good at postdictions, of course. The utility of which is at least a tad suspect.
«A problem I often find with economic truisms is that they tend to carefully ignore the time component.»
It's a bit of an aside, but I feel like I keep waiting for someone to finally invent a proper calculus of economics. Taking economics classes side-by-side electrical engineering classes in college the lack of time in most economics work seemed particularly jarring at that time. I kept wanting to convert economics to some semblance of electrical diagrams and investigate deeper the first and second derivatives of money with respect to time... (It's not the potential voltage (money) in an electrical diagram that is interesting, but differentials of voltage and current flow (and resistances to that), neither of which are well defined as concepts in any of the economics I saw in school.)
I don't know what level/classes you're taking, but I'm doing graduate classes in economics at the moment, and most concepts in macro are time-based (studying transient/long-term dynamics of systems, finding steady-states etc.).
In fact, it reminds me a lot of my undergrad electrical engineering classes.
All of the economics courses I took in college were undergrad. It says something about the field if the comparison is between graduate level economics classes and undergraduate level engineering classes.
Again, usually. Hasn't really been happening over the last few years in the US and Europe. Presumably we just wait for some arbitrary long period until inflation starts to rise again? Does the theory tell us how long?
The reason you even have to ask this question is because you don't understand MV = PQ.
I presume you mean that m is usually positively correlated with p over some unspecified time horizon?
A problem I often find with economic truisms is that they tend to carefully ignore the time component. Over a short enough time horizon this is clearly untrue. Over a long enough one it's pretty much tautological. Market theory has a similar property.
> if you print too much money, you will get inflation
Again, usually. Hasn't really been happening over the last few years in the US and Europe. Presumably we just wait for some arbitrary long period until inflation starts to rise again? Does the theory tell us how long?
So it's not that economics can't make predictions. It's just that they're often not useful predictions. It is quite good at postdictions, of course. The utility of which is at least a tad suspect.