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I have no idea how to argue against this nonsense. Basically, these are the same anti-scientific arguments that climate sceptics put forward against climate sci

by taffer 7y ago

I have no idea how to argue against this nonsense. Basically, these are the same anti-scientific arguments that climate sceptics put forward against climate science or anti-vaxers against medicine. One simply claims that a science is in reality a religion and that it serves only to support unpopular policies such as tax increases, interest rate cuts or to increase the profits of the pharmaceutical industry.

devoply 7y ago
Well go read the book and argue against that, that's good enough for me. Economics is not a science, economics uses science. The alternative to economics is politics where political decisions like austerity are not wrapped up in economics and pushed hook line and sinker. Where you are have to argue for policies politically rather than just pushing them because leading economist nobel prize winner said so.
- taffer 7y ago
  > Economics is not a science, economics uses science. So you decide what is science and what isn't? What is your model of what a science is? As long as you can't answer that, the only thing unscientific is your comment. > The alternative to economics is politics where political decisions like austerity are not wrapped up in economics and pushed hook line and sinker. You can use any science to wrap up political decisions. Also, economics is not a normative science like philosophy. Everything economics does is to say: "According to model M, if you do X in situation Y, then Z happens". If politicians turn it into austerity measures or deficit spending, then that' s politics, not economics. > because leading economist nobel prize winner said so. Be more specific. Who said what?
  - devoply 7y ago
    > So you decide what is science and what isn't? What is your model of what a science is? As long as you can't answer that, the only thing unscientific is your comment. 1. a branch of knowledge or study dealing with a body of facts or truths systematically arranged and showing the operation of general laws: the mathematical sciences. Please list a set of economic truths. Any set will be good enough as long as it can make reliable predictions that can be tested in the real world. > You can use any science to wrap up political decisions. You could, but the point is not to. Or if you want to then make sure that the science is predictive. > Be more specific. Who said what? When you are talking about the general facts that economics is often prescriptive but at the same time can be shown to be unpredictive which proves that it is not fit for this task. Yet economists and their political allies continue to argue that it is. Maybe it's better than simply political arguments and maybe the justification for supporting the orthodoxy is in line with that. That you're scared of the political outcome and so economics is a safer option.
    - taffer 7y ago
      > Please list a set of economic truths. Economics is not a mathematical science, it has no underlying axioms like mathematics. Neither does biology, medicine or climate science. Do you think these are not sciences either? > When you are talking about the general facts that economics is often prescriptive... That's wrong, economics isn't prescriptive, maybe that's your basic misunderstanding. Economics is a positive science, just like biology or climate science, it doesn't tell you what to do, it just tries to understand 'if this, then that'.
    - gbacon 7y ago
      The physicist can drop a stone with a certain mass from a tower of a particular height and can predict that the next time she drops that rock from that tower, it will take the same amount of time to hit the ground. Social science, which is most definitely science, must deal with the additional complexity of dealing with weird, quirky, fickle human beings. In a real sense, you and I are not the same people we were yesterday. Rocks and towers are much less interesting from that perspective. Some physical or hard sciences, even without people, are lousy at predicting. Meteorology is a science, and there’s a reason for the old saw that the weather man is never right. What meteorology and social sciences have in common is they study complex dynamic systems where knowing the state of the entire system at any given time is difficult or even impossible and seemingly insignificant differences in precision can produce entirely different predictions. Sometimes it is not the scale of complexity that makes a problem tough to tackle. I believe we agree that mathematics is a science, and I’ll make the modest claim that theoretical computer science is a branch of mathematics. We cannot predict in general whether an arbitrary Turing machine given a certain input will halt or run forever. Nevermind the simple question of whether a computer program will eventually terminate: Rice’s theorem tells us that in general we cannot predict whether an arbitrary program has any interesting property. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rice%27s_theorem https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rice%27s_theorem Science is more than just high school physics problems.
  - tomrod 7y ago
    Economist here! Economics is definitely not a science. It is a social science -- it can use the methodological tools of science to investigate and support theories applied in situations where the whole may behave predictably but individuals typically won't. We certainly test hypotheses, strategize, and theorize. But, contrary to physics or biology, there probably will never be a set of iron-clad rules and facts that can be derived. When I went through graduate school, the elephant in the room was "where did preferences come from?" Preferences are used as the basis of analysis in microeconomics, and macroeconomics tries to base itself on top of micro. The answers of the day were unsatisfying -- neuroscience has made great strides, but we still only see the observation without knowing the underlying system itself.
    - taffer 7y ago
      If the social sciences follow the scientific method, then I would call it science. It isn't a natural science, but a science.
      - tomrod 7y ago
        We use science to investigate, but not solely. It is not the only set of tools in the kit.
  - chroem- 7y ago
    I think a good litmus test for whether a field of study should be classfied as philosophy or science, is whether or not experts within the field are able to achieve consensus. For economics being a strict science, there are a shocking number of experts who can't agree on the laws of economics.
    - Merrill 7y ago
      "This is how the world works", is science. "This is what we can do about it", is engineering. "This is what we should do about it", is politics. It's OK for scientists to work on engineering problems or on political policies, but we all need to be aware of what domain we are in.
    - taffer 7y ago
      Why is agreement a measure of how scientific a field is? I would argue that if there are no conflicting views, no progress can be made. I would also argue that the older a science is, the more consensus there will be for fundamental things, and since economics is a rather new science, there are fewer things economists can agree on. Besides, there are actually a lot of things that economists agree on: https://gregmankiw.blogspot.com/2009/02/news-flash-economists-agree.html?m=1 https://gregmankiw.blogspot.com/2009/02/news-flash-economist...
      - chroem- 7y ago
        >since economics is a rather new science Isaac Newton's Principia was first published in English in 1728. Adam Smith published The Wealth of Nations in 1776. That's a 48 year head start out of the nearly 250 years we have had both physics and economics.
        QuesnayJr 7y ago
        Economics as a serious empirical science is a post-World War 2 phenomenon. Ptolemy had better data about the planets in the second century than we had about the economy in the early twentieth century.
gyuserbti 7y ago
Like a lot of things, the truth is in the middle, and for awhile the pendulum has swung in the direction of certified experts. The problem with this societal paradigm is that experts are often wrong, there's fads, and corruption. Responses to criticism that label the critics uninformed, unscientific, or defective (eg paranoid) are essentially ad hominem. A system like this will inevitably fail because the experts are shielded from responsibility, when if anything they should be expected to be able to tolerate greater criticism. This problem cuts across many areas at the moment. Economics isn't the only thing.
- taffer 7y ago
  I don't think the pendulum swung too much towards the experts. Just a few weeks ago, there was an article here on Hacker News (I can't find it at the moment), according to which climate scientists and climate change deniers get almost the same coverage in American news articles and I don't think this is a topic where the truth is in the middle.
  - gyuserbti 7y ago
    I don't think the truth is always in the middle but it often is. Climate change is an interesting example; maybe too much to say via mobile but I'd argue that even though the evidence for climate change is pretty clear, climate scientists have underplayed their errors at times and the wide level of uncertainty involved. The recent retraction is a good example. I think this kind of attitude backfired, by making the blindspots that much more vulnerable. See, for example, recent discussions here about reforestation efforts using non-native monoculture, which could be seen as a similar dynamic to the experts-knows-best problem. I'm not saying reforestation is bad, only that it is another example of experts having biases going unnoticed. Also, it could be argued that the climate change problem is really a socioeconomic one. I wouldn't say this has been neglected, but berating consumers and producers for what is more of a systemic problem isn't the most helpful thing.
- QuesnayJr 7y ago
  Lots of critics are uninformed, unscientific, and defective. the world is full of people who make confident pronouncements about the field of economics that are ill-informed. (It's actually a bit mysterious to me why that is.)
calmlynarczyk 7y ago
I feel the same way about OP's article. I'm not sure what it's trying to get at. The example it keeps going back to is Nixon getting rid of the draft by using an argument made by an economist to justify it. The author lambasts Nixon for using an economic (i.e. data-based) argument rather than a feelings-based argument ("one that weighed national security, military readiness, and democratic control"). But then later the author rails against how economists are too beholden to their own "bias" and "political" beliefs. So which is it? Are we to utilize evidence to help justify our decisions, or should we base our policy decisions off of our gut? It sounds like the author prefers that we defer our social policy decisions to philosophers, a profession even less beholden to hard evidence to back their conclusions. But bias and political beliefs are simply an extension of personal philosophy, so... you would just end up right back where we started trying to reduce personal preference leaking into hard facts and poisoning the problem-solving process. It's one thing to say that we shouldn't elevate scientific findings and theories (and in turn their founders) to dogmatic levels. Science is a technique to offer answers to problems; nothing more. The technique and its findings can be incorrect or misused or simply misunderstood, but I don't see how the alternatives proposed are any better. Yes, it would be nice if we (and by extension, our elected officials) could have come to the conclusion about the ill effects of the draft based on an argument like "it's bad to force people to go to war for a cause they might not believe in", but that is an open-ended philosophical question and is why we have a democratic process in the first place. We all get a say in what our values are and how our public policy aligns with those values. I feel like the author does exactly what he argues against: hand-picks a number of data points (very loose ones in this case), packages them up into some kind of position that backs his worldview that things are not going the way he would prefer, and then uses that to argue a deeper philosophical point rather than just get at the concept that scientific findings can often be abused (maybe because that is a much harder problem to solve than just saying economists suck). Don't even get me started on the fact that the author refers to economists as "privileged" and infers that they are a social class which "came to enter policymaking and insinuate themselves into the governing class". As if people in the field of economics are just born into this powerful bubble in society and should shut their mouths because they simply got lucky in life; not that many of them worked hard to get in to their current profession.

by taffer 7y ago

devoply 7y ago

Well go read the book and argue against that, that's good enough for me. Economics is not a science, economics uses science. The alternative to economics is politics where political decisions like austerity are not wrapped up in economics and pushed hook line and sinker. Where you are have to argue for policies politically rather than just pushing them because leading economist nobel prize winner said so.

taffer 7y ago
> Economics is not a science, economics uses science. So you decide what is science and what isn't? What is your model of what a science is? As long as you can't answer that, the only thing unscientific is your comment. > The alternative to economics is politics where political decisions like austerity are not wrapped up in economics and pushed hook line and sinker. You can use any science to wrap up political decisions. Also, economics is not a normative science like philosophy. Everything economics does is to say: "According to model M, if you do X in situation Y, then Z happens". If politicians turn it into austerity measures or deficit spending, then that' s politics, not economics. > because leading economist nobel prize winner said so. Be more specific. Who said what?
- devoply 7y ago
  > So you decide what is science and what isn't? What is your model of what a science is? As long as you can't answer that, the only thing unscientific is your comment. 1. a branch of knowledge or study dealing with a body of facts or truths systematically arranged and showing the operation of general laws: the mathematical sciences. Please list a set of economic truths. Any set will be good enough as long as it can make reliable predictions that can be tested in the real world. > You can use any science to wrap up political decisions. You could, but the point is not to. Or if you want to then make sure that the science is predictive. > Be more specific. Who said what? When you are talking about the general facts that economics is often prescriptive but at the same time can be shown to be unpredictive which proves that it is not fit for this task. Yet economists and their political allies continue to argue that it is. Maybe it's better than simply political arguments and maybe the justification for supporting the orthodoxy is in line with that. That you're scared of the political outcome and so economics is a safer option.
  - taffer 7y ago
    > Please list a set of economic truths. Economics is not a mathematical science, it has no underlying axioms like mathematics. Neither does biology, medicine or climate science. Do you think these are not sciences either? > When you are talking about the general facts that economics is often prescriptive... That's wrong, economics isn't prescriptive, maybe that's your basic misunderstanding. Economics is a positive science, just like biology or climate science, it doesn't tell you what to do, it just tries to understand 'if this, then that'.
  - gbacon 7y ago
    The physicist can drop a stone with a certain mass from a tower of a particular height and can predict that the next time she drops that rock from that tower, it will take the same amount of time to hit the ground. Social science, which is most definitely science, must deal with the additional complexity of dealing with weird, quirky, fickle human beings. In a real sense, you and I are not the same people we were yesterday. Rocks and towers are much less interesting from that perspective. Some physical or hard sciences, even without people, are lousy at predicting. Meteorology is a science, and there’s a reason for the old saw that the weather man is never right. What meteorology and social sciences have in common is they study complex dynamic systems where knowing the state of the entire system at any given time is difficult or even impossible and seemingly insignificant differences in precision can produce entirely different predictions. Sometimes it is not the scale of complexity that makes a problem tough to tackle. I believe we agree that mathematics is a science, and I’ll make the modest claim that theoretical computer science is a branch of mathematics. We cannot predict in general whether an arbitrary Turing machine given a certain input will halt or run forever. Nevermind the simple question of whether a computer program will eventually terminate: Rice’s theorem tells us that in general we cannot predict whether an arbitrary program has any interesting property. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rice%27s_theorem https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rice%27s_theorem Science is more than just high school physics problems.
- tomrod 7y ago
  Economist here! Economics is definitely not a science. It is a social science -- it can use the methodological tools of science to investigate and support theories applied in situations where the whole may behave predictably but individuals typically won't. We certainly test hypotheses, strategize, and theorize. But, contrary to physics or biology, there probably will never be a set of iron-clad rules and facts that can be derived. When I went through graduate school, the elephant in the room was "where did preferences come from?" Preferences are used as the basis of analysis in microeconomics, and macroeconomics tries to base itself on top of micro. The answers of the day were unsatisfying -- neuroscience has made great strides, but we still only see the observation without knowing the underlying system itself.
  - taffer 7y ago
    If the social sciences follow the scientific method, then I would call it science. It isn't a natural science, but a science.
    - tomrod 7y ago
      We use science to investigate, but not solely. It is not the only set of tools in the kit.
- chroem- 7y ago
  I think a good litmus test for whether a field of study should be classfied as philosophy or science, is whether or not experts within the field are able to achieve consensus. For economics being a strict science, there are a shocking number of experts who can't agree on the laws of economics.
  - Merrill 7y ago
    "This is how the world works", is science. "This is what we can do about it", is engineering. "This is what we should do about it", is politics. It's OK for scientists to work on engineering problems or on political policies, but we all need to be aware of what domain we are in.
  - taffer 7y ago
    Why is agreement a measure of how scientific a field is? I would argue that if there are no conflicting views, no progress can be made. I would also argue that the older a science is, the more consensus there will be for fundamental things, and since economics is a rather new science, there are fewer things economists can agree on. Besides, there are actually a lot of things that economists agree on: https://gregmankiw.blogspot.com/2009/02/news-flash-economists-agree.html?m=1 https://gregmankiw.blogspot.com/2009/02/news-flash-economist...
    - chroem- 7y ago
      >since economics is a rather new science Isaac Newton's Principia was first published in English in 1728. Adam Smith published The Wealth of Nations in 1776. That's a 48 year head start out of the nearly 250 years we have had both physics and economics.
      - QuesnayJr 7y ago
        Economics as a serious empirical science is a post-World War 2 phenomenon. Ptolemy had better data about the planets in the second century than we had about the economy in the early twentieth century.

gyuserbti 7y ago

Like a lot of things, the truth is in the middle, and for awhile the pendulum has swung in the direction of certified experts. The problem with this societal paradigm is that experts are often wrong, there's fads, and corruption. Responses to criticism that label the critics uninformed, unscientific, or defective (eg paranoid) are essentially ad hominem. A system like this will inevitably fail because the experts are shielded from responsibility, when if anything they should be expected to be able to tolerate greater criticism. This problem cuts across many areas at the moment. Economics isn't the only thing.

taffer 7y ago
I don't think the pendulum swung too much towards the experts. Just a few weeks ago, there was an article here on Hacker News (I can't find it at the moment), according to which climate scientists and climate change deniers get almost the same coverage in American news articles and I don't think this is a topic where the truth is in the middle.
- gyuserbti 7y ago
  I don't think the truth is always in the middle but it often is. Climate change is an interesting example; maybe too much to say via mobile but I'd argue that even though the evidence for climate change is pretty clear, climate scientists have underplayed their errors at times and the wide level of uncertainty involved. The recent retraction is a good example. I think this kind of attitude backfired, by making the blindspots that much more vulnerable. See, for example, recent discussions here about reforestation efforts using non-native monoculture, which could be seen as a similar dynamic to the experts-knows-best problem. I'm not saying reforestation is bad, only that it is another example of experts having biases going unnoticed. Also, it could be argued that the climate change problem is really a socioeconomic one. I wouldn't say this has been neglected, but berating consumers and producers for what is more of a systemic problem isn't the most helpful thing.
QuesnayJr 7y ago
Lots of critics are uninformed, unscientific, and defective. the world is full of people who make confident pronouncements about the field of economics that are ill-informed. (It's actually a bit mysterious to me why that is.)

calmlynarczyk 7y ago

I feel the same way about OP's article. I'm not sure what it's trying to get at. The example it keeps going back to is Nixon getting rid of the draft by using an argument made by an economist to justify it. The author lambasts Nixon for using an economic (i.e. data-based) argument rather than a feelings-based argument ("one that weighed national security, military readiness, and democratic control"). But then later the author rails against how economists are too beholden to their own "bias" and "political" beliefs. So which is it? Are we to utilize evidence to help justify our decisions, or should we base our policy decisions off of our gut? It sounds like the author prefers that we defer our social policy decisions to philosophers, a profession even less beholden to hard evidence to back their conclusions. But bias and political beliefs are simply an extension of personal philosophy, so... you would just end up right back where we started trying to reduce personal preference leaking into hard facts and poisoning the problem-solving process. It's one thing to say that we shouldn't elevate scientific findings and theories (and in turn their founders) to dogmatic levels. Science is a technique to offer answers to problems; nothing more. The technique and its findings can be incorrect or misused or simply misunderstood, but I don't see how the alternatives proposed are any better. Yes, it would be nice if we (and by extension, our elected officials) could have come to the conclusion about the ill effects of the draft based on an argument like "it's bad to force people to go to war for a cause they might not believe in", but that is an open-ended philosophical question and is why we have a democratic process in the first place. We all get a say in what our values are and how our public policy aligns with those values. I feel like the author does exactly what he argues against: hand-picks a number of data points (very loose ones in this case), packages them up into some kind of position that backs his worldview that things are not going the way he would prefer, and then uses that to argue a deeper philosophical point rather than just get at the concept that scientific findings can often be abused (maybe because that is a much harder problem to solve than just saying economists suck). Don't even get me started on the fact that the author refers to economists as "privileged" and infers that they are a social class which "came to enter policymaking and insinuate themselves into the governing class". As if people in the field of economics are just born into this powerful bubble in society and should shut their mouths because they simply got lucky in life; not that many of them worked hard to get in to their current profession.