Comparison of Medicine and Economics, Both Open, Evolving, Complex Systems.

We in the world of Computer Science and Electrical Engineering know quite a lot about control systems. We have a lot of serious theory and, having produced control systems for everything from airliners and Alaskan Pipelines to internet toasters, a lot of practical experience and understanding.

We know what kind of entities we can produce Control Systems for, and Alaskan Pipelines and airliners and driverless cars are up at the top end of that complexity, but they are all mechanisms, definitely not the open, evolving, complex systems we live within.

To remind everyone :
    'open' == subject to influences from outside of the system itself,
    'evolving' == changes in the internal state of the system cause changes
        in the state transition tables themselves (or the equations defining
        the state transitions),
    'complex system' implying emergent properties, e.g. the market has
        properties that do not exist in individual trades.

This short essay compares the most complex system that human minds have partially mastered to the economy, which human minds have definitely not mastered.

That system is the human body. It is open, affected by everything from sunlight through food, drugs, bears and bullets. It is evolving, as it ages at the gross level and at levels clear down to the DNA. It is certainly a complex system, containing a couple of hundred different cell types in its subsytems, none of whose properties contain the slightest humanness.

I said above this kind of system can't be controlled, yet MDs routinely prescribe drugs that fix problems. So there is a contradiction.

The explanation is that :
    A) The human body has evolved a property called 'homeostasis' which
    allows more predictability than systems without this property.
    Homeostasis describes the control systems of physiology which
    act to keep blood pressure. temperature, blood ions, blood sugar,
    ...concentrations with a range. Teasing out these control mechanisms
    and their interactions is not complete.
    B) The human body is part of an evolved eco-system, and most of the
    external threats to human health have evolved in concert with humans
    and their predecessors.
    C) There are a 7B replicas of human physiologies and many animals
    are excellent models of subsets of the human systems. Thus we have
    a lot of different examples of problems with human physiologies that
    we can categorize and study and also we can do experiments, which isn't
    possible with most open, evolving, complex systems.

These are huge advantages, but it has nevertheless taken 100 years to reach current Medical expertise. The beginning of 'scientific medicine' was about the same time that Progressive ideology was borrowing the prestige of science, the 1920s. For medicine, that was the combination of statistics and the accumulating physiological knowledge, the serious study of which began in the mid 1800s.

Further, medical expertise, the ability to diagnose and predict, is not nearly as far along as we might think. Patients who are scheduled for heart transplants too often fail to die when they don't ever match a
donor heart. Every 25 years or so, one of the major teaching hospitals here in the US does autopsies on 1000 successive deaths. Routinely, 25% of patients have died of undiagnosed causes.

Now compare that to our economy. Obviously economics would be ecstatic with a 75% correct prediction rate. The reason it doesn't have predictive ability is that there is no possibility of doing experiments on an economy. Experiments require holding all factors constant except
the independent variable, and recording the values of dependent variables as the independent variable's value is changed. There are 1000s of 1000s of possible independent variables in the economy. There

is no possibility of holding anything constant enough to do that kind of measurements.

Also, we only have one economy, connected throughout the world, not 7B+ animal models to experiment with.

Further, I don't believe that the economics profession has begun an age of 'scientific economics'. It uses statistics, lots of math, but there is no foundation science that it rests upon, no body of theoretical knowledge external to itself that it can draw upon.

Economics produces the same kind of information as does history, facts about the past. One may discern patterns that may or may not apply to the present to predict the future, but that doesn't produce accuracy in predicting either the event or the timing of the event.

Economics, in fact, doesn't predict much.

If you can't predict any future, how can you guide yourself to a desired

future?