Tinkering

While we were out for a walk last night, my wife and I talked a little bit about economics and the economy.

I told her that though I didn't like to admit it, I really don't know what makes the economy work. I didn't mean that I didn't understand the big picture concepts, but that I didn't really understand -- even at a macro level -- how you evaluate how an economy is doing, and what to do if it isn't doing well. I just have this gut feeling that there are very bright people who can argue any side of the question, so that either they agree on how things are, but totally and vigorously disagree on how we got there and what to do now, or they agree on what we ought to do but not on how to do it. Its almost, I thought, like religion -- you sign onto a packet of beliefs into which you don't look too closely, and so long as you dammit don't look behind that curtain!!! don't try to mess with it just leave it the hell alone and sit down!!!! or try to make it do different things, you're fine.

Of course, that isn't acceptable when things are going to hell in a warp-drive-enabled hand basket. You've got to do something. You just don't necessarily know what. There are always advisers -- calm, reasonable, thoughtful people who say confidently what you must do, what the effect of doing it will be. And sometimes they're even right. But sometimes they're drastically wrong. So the best thing is to tinker just a little bit, and then look to see if things are better. And hope to hell you didn't make it worse.

When I was a performance guy, I was watching a computer system run once. It was having problems, so I told the operator to do a couple of things. Ten minutes later, things had improved, so I told him to undo what he'd done -- and he said, surprised, that he'd forgotten to do them. Here I was, thinking Oh, I fixed it, I am smart, and I hadn't done a damn thing. I didn't really understand the system at all.

Sometimes, I think that economists are like that.