Actually, it happened two months ago and I've just learnt it from Robert Johnson who posted on the failure of economic and financial theories in 2008 ( http://business.time.com/2012/01/19/economists-a-profession-at-sea/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+timeblogs%2Fcurious_capitalist+%28TIME%3A+Business%29) . Obviously, there is a trade-off between theories and observations. Soft sciences, like history or philosophy, do not pretend to describe the world in quantitative terms. Hard sciences are fully quantitative and do not consider any deviation from the scientific method of proof, i.e. statistics and mathematics. Economics is somehow in-between the soft and hard sciences. Economists base their theories on assumptions from the blue sky but want the outcome to be considered as in the hard sciences. There is a clear and irresolvable conflict which surfaces over and over during large economic perturbations - one pretends to adequately describe by math and statistics what s/he pretends can not be adequately describe by math and statistics. Macro economists never want and always deny their theories to be tested econometrically, i.e. in scientific way. Hence, the current situation (i.e. the painful failure to predict large changes) with economics will be repeated over and over because it is embedded in the internal structure of the economic theories.
Students have always seen and complained on the intrinsic weakness on the macroeconomic postulates. Essentially, these postulates do not give any appropriate understanding of the real world and thus confuse. (In the end of Ec10 students are usually informed that nothing from they have just learnt actually works.) The protesting Harvard students just express this simple idea which has always been with them before but which they could not express openly in quiet times due to the concealed threat from their profs.
Our economic concept is based on observations and actually predicts quantitatively the evolution of developed economics. When these protests gather more supporters demanding scientifics knowledge our concept (fully following the method adopted in the hard sciences) will be more easily accepted as the only alternative to the "soft" economics.
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