I agree with the statement that it is impossible for a state to be completely secure given the infinite number of potential threats to any one nation’s security at any given point in time. It’s like what I said on the first day of class: everything in the world is relevant to international relations – we just don’t know it yet. Similarly, everything in the world is relevant to national security – we just don’t know about it until the simmering threat actually boils over. The ‘black swan theory’ that Professor Jackson discussed during class is exactly what I’m talking about here. 9/11 was, to us, a black swan. Of course, in hindsight, we can see at least some of the factors that lead up to the attack – but only in hindsight.
I have heard argued, and I am at least somewhat inclined to agree, that economics is a somewhat flawed science due to the fact that it is only concretely adept at analyzing economic trends and the veracity and strength of various economic theories in hindsight. It has proven relatively worthless at prediction- at being able to, with some measure of reliability, stating what will occur in economics in the future. It is more of a historical than a practical science. The extent to which this failure at prediction holds true is evident in the amazement at which we view actually successful economic predictions, whereas if economics was a practical science, we would expect economic predictions to be true the majority of the time.
Analysis of national security seems to me to be like science: it’s the Black Swan events that have the largest impact, and there is no reliable way of predicting them. We cannot turn to analysis of past events to determine what will happen; we can only turn to analysis of past events to tell us how we might handle the aftermath of events and what we might be able to do to soften, but probably not completely prevent, the negative results.
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I would partially disagree that "economics is a flawed science" because it can't always predict the future. The predictive validity of economic models isn't infinite, and in fact is often very limited. Furthermore, economic models will always be flawed because any highly esteemed public prediction will change the way events unfold (for example, if analysts predict that the profits for BroCo will rise this quarter, investment may increase and BroCo will have additional capital with which to produce goods and make profits. However, econometrics is still precise enough to be useful. For example, the Federal Reserve and the Treasury depend on well-tested and fairly accurate models of monetary supply to craft a policy that balances factors such as unemployment, inflation, and growth. Countries that lack a well-managed central bank have extraordinary difficulty in maintaining prosperity, while in places like China in the 1980s and Bosnia in the 2000s, the development of an effective central bank has closely paralleled economic growth and increased standards of living.
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