Economics really does need to move away from math and more toward understanding the general concepts of economics and common sense. Example: wtf is the federal reserve doing? Bernanke and Yellen both have graduate degrees, but both of them are idiots. Both of them openly admit they did not see a housing bubble. It's totally normal for housing prices to go up 10-20% every year
forever. No amount of math can help you if you're working with the assumption that real estate can't possibly go down in price. Bernanke said that on TV when Maria Bartiromo asked him about the possibility of there being a real estate bubble back around 2005. Janet Yellen was recently asked if she thinks the current market is a bubble and she said no. This is the most obvious bubble in the history of the world, possibly worse than tulip mania and beanie babies. Twitter has a market cap over 21 billion dollars even though the company has never been profitable. Bubble? What bubble? How does economics work? Durrrrr.
It appears to be a systemic problem because many economists seem absolutely clueless when it comes to understanding the economy. Less than a month ago, Nobel Prize winner Eugene Fama said that he thought the federal reserve trying to sell trillions of dollars of US treasuries on the secondary market would be a "neutral event." Let's forget everything we know about economics and approach this using common sense. The fed has purchased trillions of dollars of US treasuries in order to keep the interest rates low. If buying treasuries lowers the interest rate, what should happen when the fed sells treasuries? If you're not completely retarded, you would predict interest rates going through the roof. If you're a Nobel Prize winning economist, you'll claim that flooding the market with treasuries has no effect on interest rates.
http://www.businessinsider.com/fama-to-santelli-qe-is-a-neutral-event-2013-10
The degree of this disconnect can be seen by looking at how much money economists in academia have then compare that to what super rich people believe. If a person has a firm understanding of economics, their investments should reflect this.
Marc Faber - worth hundreds of millions of dollars - Austrian school
Jim Rogers - worth hundreds of millions of dollars - Austrian school
Porter Stansberry - worth hundreds of millions of dollars - Austrian school
Peter Schiff - ballpark of 50-100 million dollars - Austrian school
Paul Krugman - won a Nobel Prize in economics, writes a snarky blog for a living - Keynesian school
Eugene Fama - won a Nobel Prize in economics, doesn't understand interest rates - who the fuck knows what school he belongs to.
Ben Bernanke - has a PhD in economics, didn't see a housing bubble - Keynesian school
Janet Yellen - has a PhD in economics, didn't see the housing bubble or the current stock bubble - Keynesian economics
If this isn't enough, go to youtube and search for "modern monetary theory."
Basically it's the theory that you can print unlimited amounts of money and it has no negative consequences. America's 100-200 trillion dollars worth of unfunded liabilities are not a problem because we can print the money into existence. Increasing the money supply by a factor of 20 won't cause inflation or anything. Just ask the people in Zimbabwe or Yugoslavia.