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I am admittedly woefully uninformed about the topic, but why is it discussions of economics seem so much more verbose than those of math and science? Perhaps it

by zumu 10y ago

I am admittedly woefully uninformed about the topic, but why is it discussions of economics seem so much more verbose than those of math and science? Perhaps it's just this article, but all this flowery language and backstory should be optional.

sebastianconcpt 10y ago
Because it involves things that are way beyond Economics and you could say are part of the never ending Cultural War (which sounds terrible but it has a bright side, differently from militar action wars the cultural war has as trench your mind, your values, your lifestyle and casualties are ideas that can't prevail). Example: Political Correctness is a weapon in the cultural war. A battlefield is the moral ground https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Culture_war https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Culture_war
ktRolster 10y ago
Math can be brief, you don't need to run experiments and interpret them. Physics can (often) perform the same experiment over and over in different circumstances to resolve a question quickly. Economics can perform an experiment once every decade, or even once every half century. For example, what would be the effect of the US government sending cash to every US citizen? We've done that three times, once under Carter, once under Bush, and once under Obama. The data needs to be analyzed thoroughly to see as much as possible the effects of the stimulus, and what was coincidence. You can't produce a "great depression" on demand; you have to wait for the next one to come along. In the mean time, you talk about it.
- D-Coder 10y ago
  "You can't produce a "great depression" on demand." Well, I think you could (eg remove all banking regulations), but you probably don't want to do that.
thr0waway1239 10y ago
In addition to the other commenters, I would also add that the more the rigor, the more concise the language used to express it can be. I once heard the comment "Math is a purely manmade language". I think that is true, and its language can be really, really terse, usually because everything that builds on foundational principles can be rolled up into even more terse language. Physics, chemistry etc. less so because it is an observation of the stuff around us, which starts getting more ambiguous. People cannot even agree if economics is a science, it certainly does not possess much rigor (in the sense of reproducible experiments) and it intersects too much with human behavior which is wildly unpredictable.
singold 10y ago
In my experience is like economists like to use weird words (at least in spanish) for example instead of using the word "promedio" (average), when there are only two numbers they call it "semi suma" (that would be the sum of multiple numbers divided by 2).
humanrebar 10y ago
Some parts of economics are more like a social science. Other commenters have already pointed out that there is limited ability to perform traditional hypothesis-testing experiments. Other parts of economics are more like philosophy. Which models and metaphors describe economies and economic decisions best? Is cash like blood? Are there invisible hands? Are interest rates levers or throttles? To what degree do groups think the way individuals do? These sorts of things don't lend themselves to Greek letters, operators, functions, and so on.
tpeo 10y ago
Well, I don't know how much uninformed about economics you actually are, but I think that at least part of this perceived verbosity is due to you being acquainted with it through stuff aimed at lay people. The Economist is a sort of popular economics reporting magazine (a "pop-econ" magazine). The stuff they write is aimed at a general audience. Though admittedly economic articles are do seem verbose when compared with math or physics articles. But there's a lot of variance in their verbosity, too: theoretical articles are pretty much just math. Empirical guys on the other hand are always somewhat verbose, as they like having some plausible stories behind the mechanisms they're testing or to explain why their instrumental variable is exogenous. The literature of subfields are/were almost entirely verbose, such as in the case of the old institutional economics. I'd say that it all boils down to: how wide the intended audience is; how established is a field or subfield is; how do new articles fit in with the older literature. When all you've got in your head is some hazy philosophical point, trying to formalize it from the outset will probably just alienate you from the discipline. So older literature will be, on average, more verbose than current literature. On the other hand, if all people do is point out more and more new issues, and if every new article is "orthogonal" to each other, they might never produce a succint framework (in which case it all turns into philosophy). And this goes for other fields too: mathematics was a verbose field too until some of it's ideas became common sense, and so was physics. Economics is still undergoing a lot of changes, and will probably undergo a lot more as economists focus themselves on narrower issues and as more data is collected.
- barrkel 10y ago
  The Economist is a world current affairs magazine with a slant towards business. It's not really about economics in the way the term is understood as an academic discipline.
oppositelock 10y ago
It's because economics is more sociology than math or science.
- barrkel 10y ago
  Economics is the study of human choices. It's applied psychology.

by zumu 10y ago

sebastianconcpt 10y ago

Because it involves things that are way beyond Economics and you could say are part of the never ending Cultural War (which sounds terrible but it has a bright side, differently from militar action wars the cultural war has as trench your mind, your values, your lifestyle and casualties are ideas that can't prevail). Example: Political Correctness is a weapon in the cultural war. A battlefield is the moral ground https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Culture_war https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Culture_war

ktRolster 10y ago

Math can be brief, you don't need to run experiments and interpret them. Physics can (often) perform the same experiment over and over in different circumstances to resolve a question quickly. Economics can perform an experiment once every decade, or even once every half century. For example, what would be the effect of the US government sending cash to every US citizen? We've done that three times, once under Carter, once under Bush, and once under Obama. The data needs to be analyzed thoroughly to see as much as possible the effects of the stimulus, and what was coincidence. You can't produce a "great depression" on demand; you have to wait for the next one to come along. In the mean time, you talk about it.

D-Coder 10y ago
"You can't produce a "great depression" on demand." Well, I think you could (eg remove all banking regulations), but you probably don't want to do that.

thr0waway1239 10y ago

In addition to the other commenters, I would also add that the more the rigor, the more concise the language used to express it can be. I once heard the comment "Math is a purely manmade language". I think that is true, and its language can be really, really terse, usually because everything that builds on foundational principles can be rolled up into even more terse language. Physics, chemistry etc. less so because it is an observation of the stuff around us, which starts getting more ambiguous. People cannot even agree if economics is a science, it certainly does not possess much rigor (in the sense of reproducible experiments) and it intersects too much with human behavior which is wildly unpredictable.

singold 10y ago

In my experience is like economists like to use weird words (at least in spanish) for example instead of using the word "promedio" (average), when there are only two numbers they call it "semi suma" (that would be the sum of multiple numbers divided by 2).

humanrebar 10y ago

Some parts of economics are more like a social science. Other commenters have already pointed out that there is limited ability to perform traditional hypothesis-testing experiments. Other parts of economics are more like philosophy. Which models and metaphors describe economies and economic decisions best? Is cash like blood? Are there invisible hands? Are interest rates levers or throttles? To what degree do groups think the way individuals do? These sorts of things don't lend themselves to Greek letters, operators, functions, and so on.

tpeo 10y ago

Well, I don't know how much uninformed about economics you actually are, but I think that at least part of this perceived verbosity is due to you being acquainted with it through stuff aimed at lay people. The Economist is a sort of popular economics reporting magazine (a "pop-econ" magazine). The stuff they write is aimed at a general audience. Though admittedly economic articles are do seem verbose when compared with math or physics articles. But there's a lot of variance in their verbosity, too: theoretical articles are pretty much just math. Empirical guys on the other hand are always somewhat verbose, as they like having some plausible stories behind the mechanisms they're testing or to explain why their instrumental variable is exogenous. The literature of subfields are/were almost entirely verbose, such as in the case of the old institutional economics. I'd say that it all boils down to: how wide the intended audience is; how established is a field or subfield is; how do new articles fit in with the older literature. When all you've got in your head is some hazy philosophical point, trying to formalize it from the outset will probably just alienate you from the discipline. So older literature will be, on average, more verbose than current literature. On the other hand, if all people do is point out more and more new issues, and if every new article is "orthogonal" to each other, they might never produce a succint framework (in which case it all turns into philosophy). And this goes for other fields too: mathematics was a verbose field too until some of it's ideas became common sense, and so was physics. Economics is still undergoing a lot of changes, and will probably undergo a lot more as economists focus themselves on narrower issues and as more data is collected.

barrkel 10y ago
The Economist is a world current affairs magazine with a slant towards business. It's not really about economics in the way the term is understood as an academic discipline.

oppositelock 10y ago

It's because economics is more sociology than math or science.

barrkel 10y ago
Economics is the study of human choices. It's applied psychology.