Science & Tech Quote by Martin Feldstein

There is a quiet provocation in Feldstein framing markets as the decisive rebuttal to technocratic confidence: if any domain should be “scientizable,” it’s finance, drenched in data and modeled to death. Yet he points to financial markets precisely because they are where elegant quantification repeatedly meets unruly human behavior. The line is doing two jobs at once. It’s a warning shot at economists who smuggle value judgments and institutional assumptions into their equations while insisting they’re merely “following the science.” And it’s a rebuke to policymakers who want to treat models as autopilots, outsourcing responsibility to spreadsheets.

The phrasing matters. “Cannot replace” isn’t anti-science; it’s anti-substitution. Feldstein is defending judgment as an irreducible civic and professional skill: deciding what risks are acceptable, what trade-offs count, what time horizon matters, when a tail risk is politically and morally intolerable. Markets, in his telling, are not neutral aggregators of truth; they are theaters of incentives, herding, reflexivity, panic, and moral hazard. Their “behavior” is the tell: prices move not only on fundamentals but on narratives about fundamentals, and on expectations about others’ expectations.

Contextually, Feldstein’s career straddled the era when macroeconomics became more formal, central banks grew more model-driven, and finance’s faith in measurement culminated in periodic crises. The subtext is accountability: when markets misbehave, “the model told me so” is not an alibi. Judgment is where the buck still stops.