Re: Austerity Fail?

So, unlike most economists I am not a sorcerer, able to conduct mystical counterfactuals in my crystal ball. So when the economists tell me that the stimulus worked even though employment with the stimulus rose higher than they thought employment would rise without the stimulus, I have no choice but to bow to their superior tarot DSGE skills and say sure, fine, whatever. Even when I learn that they are basing their claims that the stimulus worked mainly on the fact that the models that predicted that the stimulus would work now say the stimulus did work, I am too overawed by all those fancy letters after their names to question what sounds like wizardry to my dumb ass.

But then I learn that austerity, resoundingly predicted to fail, has failed, because the predictions made by austerity promoters have been falsified. And I have to ask- if stimulus proponents got a pass when their predictions were all falsified by experience because the recession was worse than they thought when they designed their program, then perhaps the same leniency should be extended to austerity proponents? Maybe when they made their projections, they had no idea how dire the situation really was, just like the architects of our stimulus say happened to them.

Or! Maybe macroeconomic projections really are a bunch of sorcery and we shouldn't pretend that we can know how trillions of daily decisions by billions of people will work out in the aggregate over the near term. Yeah, that one gets my vote.

(My personal favorite macro sorcerer is Paul Krugman, who confidently states that if only the stimulus had been a jillion zillion dollars, surely it would have worked, and then sits back confident that on no planet in this universe will his idea ever be tested.)