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> a sentence that would make any serious economist howl with laughter. A serious economist like Krugman who said the internet was going to have an impact on so
by disown 6y ago
> a sentence that would make any serious economist howl with laughter.
A serious economist like Krugman who said the internet was going to have an impact on society no more than the fax machine? Or the serious economists who helped create the asian financial crisis? Or the serious economists who created the housing bubble?
It almost seemed like you think society should care what "serious economists" think.
- jboog 6y agoCan't trust doctors because one time a doctor made a mistake! Flawless logic!
- TT3351 6y agoI hope we can both agree the standards of measurement for doctors and economists are not exactly comparable, given that one is just "is the patient better" and the other can be judged in any way imaginable. Is the economist macro, micro, do their solutions add to income inequality, or reduce it? The field of economics is clearly much more mercenary than the field of medicine.
- disown 6y agoOne time... Okay. Also, my dig wasn't at economists as individuals, but the pseudoscience called economics as a whole. There is a difference between a "mistake" like oops gave you the wrong medicine by accident and a pseudoscience like chinese medicine. And the internet prediction, asian financial crisis, housing bubble, etc aren't "mistakes"? It's just shows "serious economists" are just charlatans. The priests of modern era.
- 6510 6y agoYou are being to harsh on chinese medicine. I like the way Richard Wollf put it: There is a reason economics and business school are separate buildings.
- 6gvONxR4sf7o 6y agoEconomists make mistakes. Like any other science. Their uncertainty is larger than something like physics, but not large enough to be considered pseudoscience. In newspapers they’ll shoot their mouths, but in their journals, they’re quite scientific. Your criticisms kinda remind me of data science work, where you say “the effect of doing this will probably be between -3 and +7, assuming X, Y, and Z, so it’s worth looking into.” Which PMs (like politicians) take as 2 (+/- 5) and promise the rest of the org a gain of 2. Then we implement it and it comes out as -1 and you need a post mortem about how data scientists (economists) got it so wrong.
- carapace 6y agoTo me it seems like economics is just above numerology. Operationally it's a state pseudo-religion. The priests consult their tea leaves or goat guts or whatever and advise the kings, and no one ever talks about how full of shit they are, because that's their whole purpose. A scientific economics would be grounded in ecology and anthropology. It would talk about calories and niches. It would make reliable predictions.
- mola 6y agoWell, what actually matters in reality is how they shoot their mouth off in newspapers. In this respect, they are mostly quacks. Peddling psuedo science on the basis of pretty weak while rigorous science. Economists should stop shooting their mouth in neespapers as if they know something, that's being misleading. And hiding ideology behind _math_.
- chillacy 6y agoMuch of macro economics is unlike physics not only in uncertainty, but more critically in lack of experimentation or falsifiability. https://www.thecrimson.com/article/2013/12/13/economics-science-wang/ https://www.thecrimson.com/article/2013/12/13/economics-scie... http://skepticalphilosopher.blogspot.com/2009/02/falsifiability-and-macroeconomics.html http://skepticalphilosopher.blogspot.com/2009/02/falsifiabil... (I'm aware there are branches of economics which are based on experimentation but they seem to not be the norm)