Graham Bentley: For policymakers, history no longer even rhymes

Mark Twain reputedly opined that history does not repeat itself - but sometimes it rhymes. While one implication of the line is that past solutions can be fine-tuned to cope with modern problems, what do we do when faced with utterly new scenarios where we have no experience to fall back upon? The scientific method dictates that, if all controls work as expected, and the experiment repeatedly works as intended, the results are due to the effect of the tested variable. In the field of economic management, however, there is little to no ‘scientific' method involved. Past outcomes may not r...