system
Given the following post, respond as if you're commenting on Reddit:
human
Before every major crisis, there are always one or a few Economists who "predict" the crisis and are hyped up after everything has gone down. If Economics is an actual science deserving to be on par with other sciences, why are these predictions never mainstream and Economists can never agree on it?

In other words, is Economics only a collection of descriptive methods that should not be assumed to have significant and reliable predictive value, thus not deserving to enter into normative matters?

I am not here to attack anyone, however, this question bugs me and I wanted to hear from actual economists, since you most likely possess information that I don't for not being an academic in the field.
gpt
Many of these "economists" (I put that in quotes because many of these people aren't economists) predict things the same way Nostradamus did, be very vague, and eventually something might happen where you can retroactively say you predicted it because what you said was maybe close enough to what actually happened to fool some people. These people typically have vastly more predictions that never came true,

A broken clock is right twice a day. There are recessions every now and then, and when you constantly cry wolf and say the economy is going to shit eventually you're going to be right if you keep saying it long enough.

Economists can't predict recessions because they are by their nature unpredictable. They only happen when expectations regarding future economic conditions change and economic actors suddenly alter their behavior in response to the change in expectations:

>***Level two chaos is chaos that reacts to predictions about it, and therefore can never be predicted accurately.*** *Markets, for example, are a level two chaotic system. What will happen if we develop a computer program that forecasts with 100 per cent accuracy the price of oil tomorrow? The price of oil will immediately react to the forecast, which would subsequently fail to materialize. If the current price of oil is $90 a barrel, and the infallible computer program predicts that tomorrow it will be $100, traders will rush to buy oil so that they can profit from the predicted price rise. As a result, the price will shoot up to $100 a barrel today rather than tomorrow. Then what will happen tomorrow? Nobody knows.”*