The effect of IT on employment requires a chapter of its own (see Chapter 5). Here, we consider some other economic consequences which bear on the formulation of policies by governments and large corporations whose actions impinge on us at many points.

The dismal science

We are bombarded with interpretations of events by amateur and professional economists who tend to agree in disliking current policies, although their reasons differ as widely as the remedies they propose. Economists have not yet formulated a common body of theory, and instead of a science we have a hubbub of competing schools. Two reasons contribute to this sorry state of affairs: the frailty of economic data, and the impossibility of testing hypotheses by controlled experiments on real societies.

Refined statistical techniques – their use being often a sign of theoretical weakness – can sometimes be used to reduce the consequences of input error. IT may be able to help by gathering data where they arise, as when a cash register records item-byitem purchases as they are made. This ‘data capture at source’ will certainly increase the volume of raw material, but its quality will improve only if the data are the right ones, and representative of their kind, for they can never be complete.

Absence of theory is more troublesome, for not even a tonne of computation can make up for the lack of a gram of insight.