That is the problem. That might be what distinguishes art from science.
Science expresses itself in a structural body of knowledge that exists as a concise and rigorous definition of terms using words, math, models, etc. and a "method" describing a way of conducting their efforts. The body of scientific knowledge resides as a thing substantially external to what exists in the minds of those in the "hard" sciences today. Science is a groupware product structure to which and on which more factual knowledge is added.
The hard science knowledge base is an information structure about the physical world. Before anything was ever expressed in some form of representative structure it was a concept in the mind seeking a means of expression.
I think the first expression of hard science concepts and all of the information structure that has been created since then was picking the low hanging fruit in hindsight but not to them at the time. The first picking related directly to physical things, expressed them and their workings conceptually then built concepts on top of those concepts. That was relatively easy in the beginning and maybe still is since scientist all stand on the shoulder of their predecessors.
What was once practiced conceptually, intuitively as an art became a science as measured by the investment of the art in an independent structure of knowledge.
Medicine was once an art that has become an scientific practice. Primarily at least.
Economics is an art. Also called a social science. In my opinion it is more art than science because the body of knowledge of economics is mostly in the heads of those that practice it. It uses some math but the product of the math is often disputed because what it relates to has the substance of a marshmallow.
Hard science is based on hard physical things. Soft science is based on conceptual things. Those conceptual things can be very solid thoughts on which more solid thoughts are based. They can also be fallacious concepts, good at the time they were established but eventually seen as wrong when the evolution of progress declares a better rock solid concept upon which to base the structure of thought.
Money is a basis of economy. Economy is what money does. The gold standard evolved. It stopped being the basis for debt money. The economy changed. Fractional reserve banking was concept built on the concept of gold as money. The under laying concept of money changed to pure fiat money but the concept of the fractional reserve did not.
The structural knowledge base about money has been built by various experts writing about it. Then generations of experts writing about what previous experts had written about. The idea changed to some consensus of what economics is today but the structure of that consensus is today is found primarily in books.
On the other hand, the formalization of systems describing and implementing and controlling money was one of the first applications of computers after using them to count people and aiming naval guns.
Things in the computer system grew beyond just adding them up faster. Things were related to processes connecting them through the primary focus on the processes of other things at the basic level. Relating ever higher level processes was the evolution of computer processing. It was often discovered that higher level processes did not mesh with lower level processes when it came time to operate them all on a computer. One process or the other was changed to achieve greater efficiency. Some processing systems grew so quickly that documentation of the system lagged. It lagged until it was realized that complexity demanded it. Then it was often created by reverse engineering what had been done. Seeing what had been done as a result of the creating a documented description of the functional system often lead to improvements in the total system.
As systems became more complex there was a paradigm shift to not only viewing systems as primarily a relationship of objects that know functions and communicate with each other. This object oriented view of the total system extended itself into an object oriented programming of the system.
Today we engineer information. It is engineered from top to bottom using object oriented methodology. That is the state of the art in how computers integrate with the conceptual systems we create that they in turn enable to operate.
Somehow we operate a vast complex financial system globally on computers. That system applies to every human being and all social structures. However, I can't see any overall simple big picture of how that system operates that would provide an integrating coherent top down breakdown, bottom up analysis using state of the art information engineering methodology. I can't see what describes the basic fundamental conceptual relationship between people, business, government and money as general classes integrated down to a single person owning and using a unit of money at the bottom in a system that serves the common good.
If all of us serving ourselves serves the common good then I am searching for the big picture of how that system works.
It seems the system is not working well. It is too complex for people just writing words about it to describe although the words may or may not describe the problem. They do not describe the system. We have sophisticated ways to describe information systems.
One of the hard things about describing information systems is that a solid, objective, rational description of what the system is and does compared to what it is supposed to do is not the same thing. That has happened in the past and the result is to throw the system engineer out the door or management.
Madoff.
The following is found here:
Who are the Monetary Engineers? And What the Hell Are They Talking About?
I received my Master of Science in Monetary Engineering degree back in 2002 and nonetheless to this day no one knows what the hell that indicates. Ok, Financial Engineers are often “rocket scientists” (literally) that are hired by substantial banks and multinational corporations to construct sophisticated mathematical models with the intention to predict the likelihood of risky events, to offer valuations for instruments that are traditionally difficult to cost, and to produce synthetic securities for the hedging risk (and quite often for speculating).
The Federal Reserve banking cartel obtain these bonds (with paper currency literally made out of thin-air) on the promise that the government will pay the Federal Reserve back both the principal and a fixed rate of interest. In exchange for this interest payment, the Federal Reserve literally creates money (mostly electronically and fully out of thin air) through manipulated ledger accounts. What most people fail to recognize is that the key way Treasury generates the revenue to pay off it’s debt to the Federal Reserve is by means of taxation. Simply put, our earnings taxes goes straight to bankers.
All the "monetary engineers" want to do is play with what money does. Not what money is, which would control what it does and for whom if it is anything other than debt money.
Perhaps it is consistent with what money is: Debt Money. What it does, it does excellently: Put us all in debt. Reverse engineer that system to its fundamental purpose: Who benefits? The Common Good? The General Welfare? Society? The world?
The Banksters!! The designers of the system, the operators of the system. They defined what money is. No wonder there is no big picture of system by which we can analyze it other than this one:
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