The Fortune Tellers

The question is often asked, in James Buchanan’s famous phrase, What Should Economists Do? Mainstreamers answer, in part: forecast the future. This goal is legitimate in the natural sciences, because rocks and sound waves do not make choices. But economics is a social science dealing with people who make choices, respond to incentives, change their minds, and even act irrationally.

Austrian economists realize that the future is always uncertain, not radically so, but largely. Human action in an uncertain world with pervasive scarcity poses the economic problem in the first place. We need entrepreneurs and prices to help overcome uncertainty, although this can never be done completely.

Forecasting the future is the job of entrepreneurs, not economists. This is not to say that Austrian economists cannot expect certain consequences of particular government policies. For example, they know that price ceilings always and everywhere create shortages, and that expansions of the money supply lead to general price increases and the business cycle, even if they cannot know the time and exact nature of these expected events.