From an essay by Jean-Philippe Bouchaud in Nature a few weeks ago:

Compared with physics, it seems fair to say that the quantitative success of the economic sciences has been disappointing. Rockets fly to the Moon; energy is extracted from minute changes of atomic mass. What is the flagship achievement of economics? Only its recurrent inability to predict and avert crises, including the current worldwide credit crunch.

This sort of talk is going around quite a bit these days about the failure of economic / financial models. Jonah Lehrer draws a comparison between economics and the collapse of the cod industry, with good discussion — some commenters take him to task on the possibility that the models of the cod fishery were good, it was the implementation that was dishonest.

Now, Bouchaud (who appears to be both an economist and a physicist) is being a bit disingenuous. In physics, it is much easier to falsify a model, and therefore much easier to reject it. Any science that includes human input is necessarily more nuanced and difficult to understand. So revolutionizing economics, or conservation, takes longer. But it also requires a willingness of actors to acknowledge that the models aren’t working in the first place.

Attacking conservationists for being blind to what isn’t working is a pretty good straw man. We could re-forest the Amazon with the papers written fretting over what does and doesn’t work. But where is the revolution? Who is demanding real change these days in conservation?

[Trying to catch up on this Veterans Day, so some links may be a little... stale]