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These complaints against economics are getting ridiculous. It's the same BS that's getting levied against climate science, coming from a place of ignorance. Sci

by imh 9y ago

These complaints against economics are getting ridiculous. It's the same BS that's getting levied against climate science, coming from a place of ignorance. Science is hard. It feels like, "Physics can't unify QM and gravity, it must be wrong!" Well yeah, there might be parts that will be discovered to be broken, and it can't describe everything yet, but there are parts that are totally valid and incredibly important. Econ is like that, just younger and less mature. Not having all the answers doesn't make it astrology. Imagine that some poorly understood aspect of physics was incredibly important. Maybe we get devastating earthquakes across the country every 6 years. Physicists can't predict these very well, so physics is astrology? Even without perfect understanding, the government has to make decisions about earthquake relief and planning. I would hope they turn to the scientists to see which areas have the highest risk, even though the predictions will likely still be way off. Earthquake-ology is young and hard, but it's better than letting actualy astrologers drive. More surprising than anything in this article is the suggestion that the math and stats are a bad influence. I flip a coin, telling you it has a 60% chance of coming up heads. It comes up tails, 'proving me wrong.' Are you going to accuse me of peddling pseudoscience?

westoncb 9y ago
> Are you going to accuse me of peddling pseudoscience? For that example, no. The actual issue is analogous to making calculations with very high precision when your input data is of much lower precision; if you use those latter decimals to draw conclusions, you may as well be casting tea leaves or whatever. I think where people have an issue with Econ is where it takes some vague tendency in human behavior that kind of makes sense to think of as a rule that maybe holds, and then use it as a basis for making rigorous deductions on the supposition that the rule holds absolutely. (At least this is the complaint I'm familiar with, that much of its grounding is based in outmoded pop psychology.)
vbuwivbiu 9y ago
Isn't the difference simply that physics has theories backed by reproducible experiments, whereas economics has theories but one can't do such reproducible experiments without an inspectable multiverse to settle all the counterfactuals.
- imh 9y ago
  Not really. Climate science is actually a decent analogy. We look at the historical record (observational, can't do experiments, very macro) and combine it with theory we can back up from foundations and experiments (done on a micro level) and get an overall picture of how things work. Just as we don't need to recreate the entire planet's history in a lab, we don't need to recreate the global economy. I chose the 'large earthquake' example deliberately. We can't do experiments on the level of large-scale earthquakes, it's very hard and pretty inaccurate, but we can still do quite a bit of real science. And it turns out that physics is more than just earthquakes, just as econ is more than macro. This isn't to say that macroeconomics is spot on or even good, but just to say the challenges around experimentation aren't fundamental barriers to scientific understanding.
soVeryTired 9y ago
Take one of the most widely-known principles in macro: the Philips curve. In its most basic form, it says that as unemployment decreases, employment increases. The trouble is, it doesn't work very well. So economists augment it with other unobservable variables like 'inflation expectations'. But if you go looking for evidence that these newer models are any better, 99% of what you'll find is theory. The rules of the game reward you for making elegant models, not for making good empirical predictions.
deleted 9y ago
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by imh 9y ago

westoncb 9y ago

> Are you going to accuse me of peddling pseudoscience? For that example, no. The actual issue is analogous to making calculations with very high precision when your input data is of much lower precision; if you use those latter decimals to draw conclusions, you may as well be casting tea leaves or whatever. I think where people have an issue with Econ is where it takes some vague tendency in human behavior that kind of makes sense to think of as a rule that maybe holds, and then use it as a basis for making rigorous deductions on the supposition that the rule holds absolutely. (At least this is the complaint I'm familiar with, that much of its grounding is based in outmoded pop psychology.)

vbuwivbiu 9y ago

Isn't the difference simply that physics has theories backed by reproducible experiments, whereas economics has theories but one can't do such reproducible experiments without an inspectable multiverse to settle all the counterfactuals.

imh 9y ago
Not really. Climate science is actually a decent analogy. We look at the historical record (observational, can't do experiments, very macro) and combine it with theory we can back up from foundations and experiments (done on a micro level) and get an overall picture of how things work. Just as we don't need to recreate the entire planet's history in a lab, we don't need to recreate the global economy. I chose the 'large earthquake' example deliberately. We can't do experiments on the level of large-scale earthquakes, it's very hard and pretty inaccurate, but we can still do quite a bit of real science. And it turns out that physics is more than just earthquakes, just as econ is more than macro. This isn't to say that macroeconomics is spot on or even good, but just to say the challenges around experimentation aren't fundamental barriers to scientific understanding.

soVeryTired 9y ago

Take one of the most widely-known principles in macro: the Philips curve. In its most basic form, it says that as unemployment decreases, employment increases. The trouble is, it doesn't work very well. So economists augment it with other unobservable variables like 'inflation expectations'. But if you go looking for evidence that these newer models are any better, 99% of what you'll find is theory. The rules of the game reward you for making elegant models, not for making good empirical predictions.

deleted 9y ago

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