An important aspect of good computer science is understanding the root causes for bad behavior in a system. Without a deep understanding, hacking around the problem often leads to bigger problems down the road. The original problem was not addressed, and the workaround can easily introduce unintended side effects or new errors.
Similar rigor is true for hard sciences like biology, chemistry, and physics. Einstein's famous theorems could be seen as an evaluation of the root causes for physical phenomena that didn't agree with classical physics.
This doesn't happen with economics. Case in point: economists point to the start of the Great Recession to 2008, when the acceleration in mortgage failures could no longer be ignored. However, the root causes for those failures can be traced much further back, like the repeal of Glass-Stiegal in the 1990s, Greenspun's lackadaisical and obfuscatory management of the Fed, the lack of regulation of the mortgage industry that followed, corruption across the board in the finance industruy, including regulators, the de-fanging of the STC and so on.
The failure to dig into root causes is one of the things that constrains the utility of economics (pun intended). Another is its dependence on the notion of people as rational actors, but at least this problem is being addressed to some degree by the field of behavioral economics. But perhaps this is optimistic.
Illustrating this blindness to root causes is an interview of Neel Kashkari, where he says he bought a house in California in 2005, and "didn't see it coming." I found this stunning. I was shopping for a home in California in 2005, and everything was screaming "this is insanity!" Ads on the radio for insane loan offers, home prices outstripping every other economic indicator, a dentist I met who was doing interest-only loans and laddering up into ever-more expensive zipcodes, and who thought he was a genius. It. Was. Nuts. The writing was on the wall, in wall-tall letters.
The best part, the truly best part is that guys like Kashkari take credit for turning things around, but did they really do anything to improve the odds of against future financial disasters? Like, some perp walks for the greedheads who almost destroyed the world's economy? Or a serious restructuring of the financial industry to counter the centralization of wealth and power? Ironic scornful laughter ensues.
