‘If things are not repeating, if things are not in equilibrium, what can we, as economists, say? How could you predict anything? How could you have a science?’” Holland took the question very seriously; he’d thought a lot about it. Look at meteorology, he told them. The weather never settles down. It never repeats itself exactly. It’s essentially unpredictable more than a week or so in advance. And yet we can comprehend and explain almost everything that we see up there. We can identify important features such as weather fronts, jet streams, and high-pressure systems. We can understand their
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