We know from chaos theory that even if you had a perfect model of the world, you'd need infinite precision in order to predict future events. With sociopolitical or economic phenomena, we don't have anything like that.

Democracies can't handle austerity measures very well.

Life is a tightrope between two errors: generalizing the wrong particular and particularizing the wrong general.

Realism is punishing. Probabilistic skepticism is worse.

We know from chaos theory that even if you had a perfect model of the world, you'd need infinite precision in order to predict future events. With sociopolitical or economic phenomena, we don't have anything like that.

The track record of economists in predicting events is monstrously bad. It is beyond simplification; it is like medieval medicine.

Probability is not a mere computation of odds on the dice or more complicated variants; it is the acceptance of the lack of certainty in our knowledge and the development of methods for dealing with our ignorance.