Why does a public discussion of economic policy so often show the abysmal ignorance of the participants?

You can see the computer age everywhere but in the productivity statistics.

Why does a public discussion of economic policy so often show the abysmal ignorance of the participants?

Computers show up everywhere except the growth statistics.

Suppose someone sits down where you are sitting right now and announces to me that he is Napoleon Bonaparte. The last thing I want to do with him is to get involved in a technical discussion of cavalry tactics at the Battle of Austerlitz. If I do that, I'm getting tacitly drawn into the game that he is Napoleon Bonaparte.

But part of the job of economics is weeding out errors. That is much harder than making them, but also more fun.

If God had meant there to be more than two factors of production, He would have made it easier for us to draw three-dimension al diagrams.