Nick Szabo  🔑

That's economics' second-biggest flaw. Its biggest flaw is its habit of assuming away coercion (in politics, foreign affairs and trade, immigration, law, crime, etc.) and security and yet pretending that its results are universal or readily applicable in coercive situations.https://twitter.com/EconTalker/status/1098641809608269824 …

Explain, please. Example?

Most political issues provide examples but here is one where everybody thinks economics should dominate thinking: foreign trade. Economists count the foreign revenues as benefit, even when those revenues are being used to build nuclear missiles aimed at the trading partner.

If you think an economic model is failing to explain reality, it can be improved. That's part of economics too. And btw economics deals (or can deal) with what you are talking about - e.g.: externalities.

But economists very seldo improve their models in these very obvious ways. They have, generally speaking, simply removed the massive amounts of coercion and security that exist in the real world outside of their purview of thinking.

Would say those are bad economists. One of the main differences between economics and accounting is that the former also deals with non-monetary, hidden costs as well. It's the economist job to consider effects beyond short-term $ gain.

Having gone through Economics grad school, I can confirm that Economists almost *never* include geopolitical forces in their models. Papers that do, don't get published. It's just not the focus of Economics as a discipline.