How does the economy work? A new Fed paper suggests nobody really knows
Along similar lines, nobody "really knows" how Google search works. Sure, you have some experts who can talk about how parts of the algorithm work, you have the underlying bones of page rank, you even have SEO experts who can get you reasonably close to the top search results.But is there a single individual on earth who knows all the ins and outs of all the minutiae of every single aspect of Google search - from search result algorithm to ingestion to crawling to artificial intelligence? Not a chance.You don't even have to get as complicated as Google search - any reasonably complex software system with hundreds of engineers working on it will be beyond the comprehension of any human being - fully understanding that is (which also entails knowing exactly all the edge cases, all the bugs, all the unexpected results possible, etc.)How does the economy work? Nobody knows - but that doesn't mean nothing intelligent can be said about it, or that the Fed can't make reasonable decisions on imperfect information - just like any other incredibly complex system that humans struggle to understand.