As an academic field, economics is completely underperforming. It's no suprise interesting research comes from other areas, such as physics in this case.
The results raise questions of where and when a company could choose to exert this influence, but Glattfelder and Battiston are reluctant to speculate.
"In this kind of science, complex systems, you're not aiming at making predictions [like] ... where the tennis ball will be at given place in given time," Battiston said.
It's nice to see that physicists are able to recognise the limits of knowledge when it comes to complex systems. You probably wouldn't hear a macroeconomist / econometrician say that, they would typically weigh in with some kind of prediction based on a dubious, self-referential model.
In fairness to economics, it's one of the most politicized fields. Back when hard sciences were a threat to some religious dogma, there was lots of trouble even doing astronomy. Economics is up against something a little similar to that right now.
Agreed. It took way too long for economists to integrate cognitive bias and social effects on rational decision making. Further, they have traditionally not integrated tools from analyzing networks, common in complex systems analysis.
Economics should basically rebrand itself as a subfield of complex systems analysis.
I studied Econ for a long time and came away rather frustrated with the limited toolset. Statistics, Computer Science, Math and Physics have better tools available.
