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It seems that you are not disagreeing with the concept of false consciousness. You just believe that a different group of people suffer from it. I hope you don'

It seems that you are not disagreeing with the concept of false consciousness. You just believe that a different group of people suffer from it. I hope you don't consider it too much of a caricature of your position for me to say that you think the elite labour under a lot of false beliefs but the working classes are able to see through all of this based on their own experience and clear insight. I think at the core of this discussion, and false consciousness in general, is the question of how can we know what knowledge is true. I certainly agree with you, probably more than it appears in this thread, that we shouldn't take economics as some objective science. That's why I said up-thread that this is all discursive. But I think we are in real danger of throwing the baby out with the bath water and dismissing any economic knowledge at all. Larry Elliot has a good article here about economists' failings [1]. What I take from that is that, yes, forecasts are very shaky but economics itself analyses the failings and uses it to build better understanding (whether HMT uses that knowledge is a different question). SWL talks here [2] about the benefits of trade and compares dismissals of economic knowledge to climate denial. I think that's too strong but I am reluctant to dismiss the idea that we can gain empirical economic knowledge. (Incidentally if you know any good, pro-Brexit economics blogs please do let me know). It seems that you implicitly rely on economics in some of your scenarios, thinking etc but then when you come against an economic idea or prediction you disagree with you just dismiss it with "oh well, economists are always wrong". I mean, if they are then how do you know the economics implied in your scenarios are correct? Why bother trying to get trade deals? Why bother making any economic arguments for Brexit if it's all unknowable? How do you know which of the US-style economic policies are the ones that created the growth? Surely there is some validity in testing hypotheses? Continuing this skepticism, maybe you don't intend this but your comments read as if you think working-class people have some kind of natural, clear-headed insight from their lived experience that the elite and their academics don't have. I'm not sure from where you draw your certainty that you know what the entire working class is thinking, nor why a judgement based on individual lived experience should be any more reliable than one based on broader evidence. I don't think "economists missed the 2008 crash and got post-Brexit wrong so I can ignore them all now and go off what I see around me" is really a strong argument. If all these expert economists with their models and their papers can't make a prediction why should you or I believe that you can? Maybe, like some economist, you've got a model that worked a few times but is going to come crashing down any day now. Shouldn't the same skepticism apply to you? Your whole scenario was based on the idea that the EU coveted the UK's growth rate but when I linked to World Bank data showing that in 2018 the UK underperformed literally every member state but Italy (ok, level with Germany) you still say that we're doing very well compared to other member states. See [3] for more recent data -- hardly comparing very well either. France is comparable and I wouldn't say the US is in a different ballpark. It doesn't seem like you update your priors in response to new data so what makes you think you are any more likely to be right? Or, to return to falsifiability, what would make you think you're wrong? Coming back to false consciousness, I don't think it's the views themselves that are problematic but the way in which they are reached. I am doubtful that many people complaining about immigrants overcrowding their hospitals have looked at any evidence to decide whether the complaint is valid. I don't think "lived experience" is enough to make an objective, accurate assessment. You are right of course that we should critique arguments and not just take them at face value. For what it's worth, I'm a lukewarm remainer and I agree entirely with you about the Remain campaign's terrible campaigning. They also failed to mention the impact on N Ireland, which is far more significant and it's a terrible indictment of the British public that neither side bothered to think about the border. That didn't last long anyway... [1] https://www.theguardian.com/business/economics-blog/2017/jan/08/economic-forecasts-hardwired-get-things-wrong https://www.theguardian.com/business/economics-blog/2017/jan... [2] https://mainlymacro.blogspot.com/2019/10/brexit-is-denial-of-economics-as.html https://mainlymacro.blogspot.com/2019/10/brexit-is-denial-of... [3] https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/documents/2995521/10075412/2-14112019-AP-EN.pdf/c29b43ca-1bc8-d863-cbcd-31cc05068ddf https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/documents/2995521/10075412/2-1...

thu2111 7y ago
I suppose I didn't quite understand what you meant by false consciousness. It sounded a bit like "people want what they're told by others to want and that's bad" in the example of feminism, but isn't that just the process of opinion forming? If the governing classes have been told their whole life the EU is good, the future, peace, civilisation etc and then support Remain, are they labouring under false consciousness? Or what does it mean, precisely? I think there is economic knowledge we can know to be true. A lot of the basics is surely sound, but also quite obvious and simple (supply and demand, printing money creates inflation etc). The problem and question is to what extent things go off the rails after that? It's worth calibrating our expectations against other fields of science, for example: 1. Ioannadis argued in a very well known paper that about half of all published research findings are false. 2. I've heard repeatedly that Big Pharma/VC supports this, and biotech doesn't get more investment (vs say software firms) partly because about half of all academic microbiology doesn't replicate. 3. Psychology as a field has witnessed large areas collapse completely during the replication crisis: entire careers and phenomenons with hundreds of papers investigating them just turn out to be based on nonsense. A good example of the latter is this one: https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/05/07/5-httlpr-a-pointed-review/ https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/05/07/5-httlpr-a-pointed-rev... It's entirely reasonable to assume that most academic output is false, and that average is significantly biased upwards by hard sciences that are empirically testable. If you focus on subjects that produce explanations of observed data independent of large scale experiments (psychology, economics, history, sociology, yes also climatology etc) then it's fair to assume the vast majority of published output is wrong. This may seem radical or absurd, but I think this view will become more widespread in future. For instance even in psychology, where experiments are possible (unlike economics), many studies are statistically underpowered to a level that can't plausibly be fixed: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4816570/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4816570/ It's certainly going to be the case that economics is more wrong than psychology; at least in psychology you can run experiments, even if they're too small. Thus, given the structural and financial setup of these fields, we can assume they will continue to produce spurious findings indefinitely. Now, you pose the following question: If all these expert economists with their models and their papers can't make a prediction why should you or I believe that you can? You and I have a major structural advantage over professional economists when it comes to making accurate predictions: our careers are not judged by our output. This gives us a huge edge because we can be as imprecise, simple or intuitive as we like and nobody will care. My Brexit economy prediction wasn't very precise, it was literally "We're being told there will be a huge recession caused by uncertainty and I think that's completely wrong". No recession, thus, my predictions were better than the economists! But mine also didn't have any numbers in it. This is the right level of precision for such a prediction given the state of economic knowledge, and for a non-professional that's fine. For a Treasury official, not so much. The underlying cause is social: academics and related professions (like government economists) are required by their peers to "publish or perish", preferably in reputable journals. Like speakers on the dinner circuit, they must speak even if they have nothing insightful to say right now. If they come up with something novel or clever sounding they will be promoted and become one of the judges themselves, where they apply the same criteria. I've been referring to the working classes because Brexit is so often positioned as the 'educated' vs the 'working class', and the article is about class distinctions. But that's actually kind of a gloss over what I really mean. My point is really about specific professions or classes vs everyone else. Your whole scenario was based on the idea that the EU coveted the UK's growth rate but when I linked to World Bank data showing that in 2018 the UK underperformed literally every member state but Italy (ok, level with Germany) you still say that we're doing very well compared to other member states. For UK vs France/Italy, remember the UK has a much lower unemployment rate: https://d3fy651gv2fhd3.cloudfront.net/charts/united-kingdom-unemployment-rate@3x.png?s=ukueilor&v=201911120938V20191105&url2=/france/unemployment-rate https://d3fy651gv2fhd3.cloudfront.net/charts/united-kingdom-... https://d3fy651gv2fhd3.cloudfront.net/charts/united-kingdom-unemployment-rate@3x.png?s=ukueilor&v=201911120938V20191105&url2=/italy/unemployment-rate https://d3fy651gv2fhd3.cloudfront.net/charts/united-kingdom-... You're right that my original point about "growth" was over-stated. I was thinking of some quarters where the UK had better GDP growth than Germany along with better employment stats than France, wage growth etc. There's been lots of positive economic news lately. But it doesn't actually matter - the overall point I was making remains even if the UK would have weaker growth at the moment. Namely, there are plausible scenarios in which leaving is good for growth and you don't have to be ignorant to believe them. We can see how the EU seems to be scared of the idea of the UK deregulating and becoming more competitive. For instance Angela Merkel stated outright that in future Germany may have to face the UK as a competitor alongside China and the USA (implication: today they don't). The French Secretary of State for European Affairs has said outright about the UK, "I don't want a tax haven on our doorstep". It seems like they take the scenario of a stronger British economy outside the EU seriously, and I guess that's enough to validate the scenario. Re: economics blogs. Unfortunately I don't read any economics blogs. The Telegraph has columnists who lay out some of the ideas and Leave campaigners (including Boris, to his credit) have in the past proposed various things the UK could do to increase competitiveness, like the free ports. Finally, falsifiability. Yes, I do think about this. One thing that makes it hard is my own predictions are a mix of short range which were proven true already, and long range, but those are only about a specific scenario that probably won't happen (Conservatives get more conservative and significantly liberalise the economy). But the advantage of not being an economist is I can happily say "I don't know what will happen next year" and nobody will care, which is why I can be more accurate than them :)

thu2111 7y ago

I suppose I didn't quite understand what you meant by false consciousness. It sounded a bit like "people want what they're told by others to want and that's bad" in the example of feminism, but isn't that just the process of opinion forming? If the governing classes have been told their whole life the EU is good, the future, peace, civilisation etc and then support Remain, are they labouring under false consciousness? Or what does it mean, precisely? I think there is economic knowledge we can know to be true. A lot of the basics is surely sound, but also quite obvious and simple (supply and demand, printing money creates inflation etc). The problem and question is to what extent things go off the rails after that? It's worth calibrating our expectations against other fields of science, for example: 1. Ioannadis argued in a very well known paper that about half of all published research findings are false. 2. I've heard repeatedly that Big Pharma/VC supports this, and biotech doesn't get more investment (vs say software firms) partly because about half of all academic microbiology doesn't replicate. 3. Psychology as a field has witnessed large areas collapse completely during the replication crisis: entire careers and phenomenons with hundreds of papers investigating them just turn out to be based on nonsense. A good example of the latter is this one: https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/05/07/5-httlpr-a-pointed-review/ https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/05/07/5-httlpr-a-pointed-rev... It's entirely reasonable to assume that most academic output is false, and that average is significantly biased upwards by hard sciences that are empirically testable. If you focus on subjects that produce explanations of observed data independent of large scale experiments (psychology, economics, history, sociology, yes also climatology etc) then it's fair to assume the vast majority of published output is wrong. This may seem radical or absurd, but I think this view will become more widespread in future. For instance even in psychology, where experiments are possible (unlike economics), many studies are statistically underpowered to a level that can't plausibly be fixed: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4816570/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4816570/ It's certainly going to be the case that economics is more wrong than psychology; at least in psychology you can run experiments, even if they're too small. Thus, given the structural and financial setup of these fields, we can assume they will continue to produce spurious findings indefinitely. Now, you pose the following question: If all these expert economists with their models and their papers can't make a prediction why should you or I believe that you can? You and I have a major structural advantage over professional economists when it comes to making accurate predictions: our careers are not judged by our output. This gives us a huge edge because we can be as imprecise, simple or intuitive as we like and nobody will care. My Brexit economy prediction wasn't very precise, it was literally "We're being told there will be a huge recession caused by uncertainty and I think that's completely wrong". No recession, thus, my predictions were better than the economists! But mine also didn't have any numbers in it. This is the right level of precision for such a prediction given the state of economic knowledge, and for a non-professional that's fine. For a Treasury official, not so much. The underlying cause is social: academics and related professions (like government economists) are required by their peers to "publish or perish", preferably in reputable journals. Like speakers on the dinner circuit, they must speak even if they have nothing insightful to say right now. If they come up with something novel or clever sounding they will be promoted and become one of the judges themselves, where they apply the same criteria. I've been referring to the working classes because Brexit is so often positioned as the 'educated' vs the 'working class', and the article is about class distinctions. But that's actually kind of a gloss over what I really mean. My point is really about specific professions or classes vs everyone else. Your whole scenario was based on the idea that the EU coveted the UK's growth rate but when I linked to World Bank data showing that in 2018 the UK underperformed literally every member state but Italy (ok, level with Germany) you still say that we're doing very well compared to other member states. For UK vs France/Italy, remember the UK has a much lower unemployment rate: https://d3fy651gv2fhd3.cloudfront.net/charts/united-kingdom-unemployment-rate@3x.png?s=ukueilor&v=201911120938V20191105&url2=/france/unemployment-rate https://d3fy651gv2fhd3.cloudfront.net/charts/united-kingdom-... https://d3fy651gv2fhd3.cloudfront.net/charts/united-kingdom-unemployment-rate@3x.png?s=ukueilor&v=201911120938V20191105&url2=/italy/unemployment-rate https://d3fy651gv2fhd3.cloudfront.net/charts/united-kingdom-... You're right that my original point about "growth" was over-stated. I was thinking of some quarters where the UK had better GDP growth than Germany along with better employment stats than France, wage growth etc. There's been lots of positive economic news lately. But it doesn't actually matter - the overall point I was making remains even if the UK would have weaker growth at the moment. Namely, there are plausible scenarios in which leaving is good for growth and you don't have to be ignorant to believe them. We can see how the EU seems to be scared of the idea of the UK deregulating and becoming more competitive. For instance Angela Merkel stated outright that in future Germany may have to face the UK as a competitor alongside China and the USA (implication: today they don't). The French Secretary of State for European Affairs has said outright about the UK, "I don't want a tax haven on our doorstep". It seems like they take the scenario of a stronger British economy outside the EU seriously, and I guess that's enough to validate the scenario. Re: economics blogs. Unfortunately I don't read any economics blogs. The Telegraph has columnists who lay out some of the ideas and Leave campaigners (including Boris, to his credit) have in the past proposed various things the UK could do to increase competitiveness, like the free ports. Finally, falsifiability. Yes, I do think about this. One thing that makes it hard is my own predictions are a mix of short range which were proven true already, and long range, but those are only about a specific scenario that probably won't happen (Conservatives get more conservative and significantly liberalise the economy). But the advantage of not being an economist is I can happily say "I don't know what will happen next year" and nobody will care, which is why I can be more accurate than them :)