Adam Smith, the father of economics, identified this problem in the late eighteenth century,fn3 but it is a lesson which many economists have been ignoring ever since. If you want to look like a scientist, it pays to cultivate an air of certainty, but the problem with attachment to certainty is that it causes people completely to misrepresent the nature of the problem being examined, as if it were a simple physics problem rather than a psychological one. There is hence an ever-present temptation to pretend things are more ‘logical’ than they really are.
