Traditional mainstream academic economics, by trying to be a science, has failed to answer major questions about real-life economic behavior. Economics should become a systems profession, such as management, engineering, and medicine. By closely observing the structures and policies in business and government, simulation models can be constructed to answer questions about business cycles, causes of major depressions, inflation, monetary policy, and the validity of descriptive economic theories. A system dynamics model, as a general theory of economic behavior, now endogenously generates business cycles, Kuznets cycles, the economic long wave, and growth. A model is a theory of the behavior that it generates. The economic model provides the theory, thus far missing from economics, for the Great Depression of the 1930s and how such episodes can recur 50 to 70 years apart. Simpler system dynamics models can become the vehicle for a relevant and exciting pre-college economics education. Today I will discuss an alternative to the methods that now dominate the field of academic economics. As seen by most people outside the profession, economics has failed to adequately explain what happens in the real world. A new way to examine economic behavior can grow out of the principles and practices that have been emerging from the field of system dynamics. The usual economic literature presents economics as a science, with economists trying to emulate the hard sciences such as physics. Those attempts to force economics into the mold of a science have not been satisfying. As a result of trying to pose as a science, the field of economics has become substantially detached from real-world behavior, and has tended toward a closed theoretical discipline disconnected from the world it tries to explain. Instead of being a science, I suggest that economics should become a systems profession. As a systems profession, economics would be parallel to management, engineering, and medicine, each of which is based on underlying sciences. An economics systems profession would be based on underlying sciences such as psychology, decision-making, and nonlinear feedback dynamics. As a systems profession, economics would then reach beyond its basic sciences to understand and redesign economic systems.
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