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James_Miller comments on Closet survey #1 - Less Wrong
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Economists' plans relating to monetary policy do influence how the Federal Reserve Board acts (since it is run by economists) and this does influence the economy.
I was including the Federal Reserve Board in "economists". Forgive me if that was a mistake.
Let me be more concrete: I suspect that the Obama stimulus plan won't accomplish anything positive, not because of any particular flaw I could name, but because the models they are using to organize their understanding of macroeconomics are just wrong - somehow or other.
The amount of chaos here seems so great - so many things going differently than predicted, so many plans failing to have their intended constructive effect - that I suspect a chaotic inversion: it's not chaos, we're just stupid.
You might try reading Thomas Woods's new book "Meltdown". It's an easy read, it took me about 4 hours. It would have been less but I had to keep stopping and thinking "How come I didn't realize that before?" It struck me as mostly accurate, which makes me wonder about mainstream economists' attacks on Austrian economics. I am definitely going to be reading more Austrian economics. Woods is an historian rather than an economist, but the core of the book is that gov't meddling in the money supply causes the business cycle - that the Federal Reserve caused the current crash by inflating the bubbles with cheap (below market) credit.
This position is not uncommon, and it is very different from my understanding of your first comment.
I believe this about climate change as well.
For what it's worth, I think lots of people are confused about macroeconomics, including many/most economists. However, there is a particular macroeconomic/monetaryeconomic theory which does give substantial insight: monetary equilibrium theory (goes by a few other names). Unfortunately, I can't give good resource for learning this theory. I'm slowly working on an introductory series.