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That's kinda the point. We define what a spherical cow is to be able to compare the real world against it. The problem for economists is that lay persons take t

That's kinda the point. We define what a spherical cow is to be able to compare the real world against it. The problem for economists is that lay persons take that spherical cow to be truth and base whole ideological systems on those spherical cow.

throwaway894345 6y ago
This is a straw man argument. The issue at hand isn't "whether a free market is eminently desirable", but whether or not the relative ability for employers (or any buyer) to wait for a better price on a good or service renders a market unfree. My position is that a market in which one party (the employer in this specific case) can wait for another party (the worker) to come down to market price is entirely congruent with the definition of a free market.
- AmpsterMan 6y ago
  Not really sure where there's a straw man here. I've addressed your concern on whether power dynamics are orthogonal or not. I've described the academic definition of what a perfectly competitive market is and referred to Coase's Theorem which essentially concludes such markets rarely exist in reality. You say they are orthogonal, and I provided evidence that they are not.
  - throwaway894345 6y ago
    It's a straw man in that no one in this thread is arguing that a free market is eminently desirable or otherwise making ideological arguments (contrary to the implication in your post). There's the chance that you weren't talking about "arguments made in this thread" and were simply digressing to "arguments made by other people elsewhere in the world" which is differently bad (off topic). To be clear, I wasn't remarking about any comments you made about my orthogonality claim.
    - AmpsterMan 6y ago
      Yeah, I was talking to the immediate commenter, not the parent. I can understand where you're coming from with my off-topic comment; it was not intended to imply anything about anyone on the thread as such, nor was it a response to the op. It was just a lament of a frustrated person when it comes to their field of study.
      - throwaway894345 6y ago
        Fair enough, and thanks for the clarification. I empathize with your frustration about bad arguments. :)
mcguire 6y ago
Economists take the spherical cow as, if not the current state of cow-dom, the perfected nature of cows and what cows would be if they got to make the rules.
- AmpsterMan 6y ago
  I'm not really sure I understand what you are trying to say here. The almost purely "logical" and "ideological" statements of 19th and early-to-mid 20th century economics have been supplanted with with more empirical methods.
  - mcguire 6y ago
    You know the supply and demand curves, from Econ 101? How they meet at one point to determine the price of the thing? The demand curve can actually have any shape, so you can have any number of points where the two curves meet, and the supply curve has the problem that a firm making extra things both will and must not change the overall number of things made. See Debunking Economics by Steve Keen.
- dragonwriter 6y ago
  > Economists take the spherical cow as, if not the current state of cow-dom, the perfected nature of cows and what cows would be if they got to make the rules. Well, sure in a way, but that includes the parts that lay people ignore like the perfect information element and perfect value optimizing decisionmaking of the rational actor model, and the absence of externalities. But most economists recognize that people aren't omniscient, don't always optimally apply the information they so have, and that you can't avoid econonicndecisions having impacts on people other than those voluntarily participating in them. Far fewer economists (basically, just the Chicago/Austrian schools, the latter of which does so as pretty overtly an article of faith) think that if you can't magically handwave those elements of the model into reality, the rest of 101-level simplified regulation-free markets still remains desirable as an ideal.

throwaway894345 6y ago

This is a straw man argument. The issue at hand isn't "whether a free market is eminently desirable", but whether or not the relative ability for employers (or any buyer) to wait for a better price on a good or service renders a market unfree. My position is that a market in which one party (the employer in this specific case) can wait for another party (the worker) to come down to market price is entirely congruent with the definition of a free market.

AmpsterMan 6y ago
Not really sure where there's a straw man here. I've addressed your concern on whether power dynamics are orthogonal or not. I've described the academic definition of what a perfectly competitive market is and referred to Coase's Theorem which essentially concludes such markets rarely exist in reality. You say they are orthogonal, and I provided evidence that they are not.
- throwaway894345 6y ago
  It's a straw man in that no one in this thread is arguing that a free market is eminently desirable or otherwise making ideological arguments (contrary to the implication in your post). There's the chance that you weren't talking about "arguments made in this thread" and were simply digressing to "arguments made by other people elsewhere in the world" which is differently bad (off topic). To be clear, I wasn't remarking about any comments you made about my orthogonality claim.
  - AmpsterMan 6y ago
    Yeah, I was talking to the immediate commenter, not the parent. I can understand where you're coming from with my off-topic comment; it was not intended to imply anything about anyone on the thread as such, nor was it a response to the op. It was just a lament of a frustrated person when it comes to their field of study.
    - throwaway894345 6y ago
      Fair enough, and thanks for the clarification. I empathize with your frustration about bad arguments. :)

mcguire 6y ago

Economists take the spherical cow as, if not the current state of cow-dom, the perfected nature of cows and what cows would be if they got to make the rules.

AmpsterMan 6y ago
I'm not really sure I understand what you are trying to say here. The almost purely "logical" and "ideological" statements of 19th and early-to-mid 20th century economics have been supplanted with with more empirical methods.
- mcguire 6y ago
  You know the supply and demand curves, from Econ 101? How they meet at one point to determine the price of the thing? The demand curve can actually have any shape, so you can have any number of points where the two curves meet, and the supply curve has the problem that a firm making extra things both will and must not change the overall number of things made. See Debunking Economics by Steve Keen.
dragonwriter 6y ago
> Economists take the spherical cow as, if not the current state of cow-dom, the perfected nature of cows and what cows would be if they got to make the rules. Well, sure in a way, but that includes the parts that lay people ignore like the perfect information element and perfect value optimizing decisionmaking of the rational actor model, and the absence of externalities. But most economists recognize that people aren't omniscient, don't always optimally apply the information they so have, and that you can't avoid econonicndecisions having impacts on people other than those voluntarily participating in them. Far fewer economists (basically, just the Chicago/Austrian schools, the latter of which does so as pretty overtly an article of faith) think that if you can't magically handwave those elements of the model into reality, the rest of 101-level simplified regulation-free markets still remains desirable as an ideal.