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I hope my ignorance can be forgiven, but every time I see economist lit it comes off as incredibly reductive. There's always something (like the secondary figh

I hope my ignorance can be forgiven, but every time I see economist lit it comes off as incredibly reductive. There's always something (like the secondary fight-night line you mention) that seems intuitively obvious to me but gets glossed over. Am I just ignorant?

smt88 5y ago
> Am I just ignorant? No. Economics academia is an "emperor's new clothes" field. They generate enormous amounts of dense, complex-sounding literature, and most if it is as you describe. It's never practical. Sometimes there are interesting models that help to understand things that happened in the past, but as a field, economics seems unable to predict anything that will happen in the future (even on a fundamental level) and therefore can't seem to graduate to the level of science.
- double_nan 5y ago
  And if you are able to do that most likely you will find yourself in a hedge fund but not in the academia.
- coliveira 5y ago
  It's like this because they start from postulates that are contrary to reality. The idea that elements in an economic systems act in a rational way, or that there is an "invisible hand" that drives the markets, or that the markets operate in equilibrium, these are all ad hoc ideas that have no basis in reality. I classify it more like a kind of economic theology.
  - pksebben 5y ago
    Yeah, that rational markets bit I keep hearing about sounds more like an example of proof that the markets we have are not rational. Like; "IF the markets WERE rational, they would probably do thing" and then thing is something that is observably not happening.
  - cturner 5y ago
    The purpose of economics is to explain complex interaction between systems. Analogy is a powerful communication tool. Such phrases allow us to communicate and reason about systems. The concepts raise the standard of policy development. Consider how much easier it is to discuss a proposal thanks to 'The Tragedy of the Commons'. Those few words serve as a shorthand for a dynamic. Without it you might need to spend half an hour stepping people through the dynamic each time you wanted to refer to it, and you would lose people along the way.
  - loki49152 5y ago
    Assuming the rationality of economic actors goes wrong primarily because economists don’t know what “rationality” is and come up with weird accounts for what “rational” behavior would be under given circumstances. They aren’t talking about “rational” behavior in the sense laymen use the term. The “invisible hand” is also something that actually does exist and is straightforward to explain. It’s the tendency individuals making decisions in their own self-interest to find others with compatible self-interest as the motivation to make a trade. Every mutually self-interested transaction adds up to a total gain for the overall economy because each side makes the trade precisely because they judge the other’s offer to be of higher value to them. The key to demystifying the observation is the insight that “value” is a judgement made by individuals in relation to their own lives, not some inherent property that can be determined apart from individuals value judgements.
roenxi 5y ago
Economics is an extremely political science, a lot of common knowledge about what economists believe/predict/do is probably wrong. There is about as much visibility into what economics actually predicts as into physics, mathematics or any other science. Most economics is quoted to try and score points in political debates where the lines are already drawn, conclusions already reached and people are mainly looking for tools to push their preferred solution. In such an environment, you might expect to see an enormous amount of very low quality economics content - probably full of motivated reasoning if you look for it. It doesn't say much about the state of the field, more about how hard it is to find the field in amongst the dross. Eg, it is reasonably clear that most people writing about about Marxism or Keynesianism haven't read Marx or Keynes wrote.

smt88 5y ago

> Am I just ignorant? No. Economics academia is an "emperor's new clothes" field. They generate enormous amounts of dense, complex-sounding literature, and most if it is as you describe. It's never practical. Sometimes there are interesting models that help to understand things that happened in the past, but as a field, economics seems unable to predict anything that will happen in the future (even on a fundamental level) and therefore can't seem to graduate to the level of science.

double_nan 5y ago
And if you are able to do that most likely you will find yourself in a hedge fund but not in the academia.
coliveira 5y ago
It's like this because they start from postulates that are contrary to reality. The idea that elements in an economic systems act in a rational way, or that there is an "invisible hand" that drives the markets, or that the markets operate in equilibrium, these are all ad hoc ideas that have no basis in reality. I classify it more like a kind of economic theology.
- pksebben 5y ago
  Yeah, that rational markets bit I keep hearing about sounds more like an example of proof that the markets we have are not rational. Like; "IF the markets WERE rational, they would probably do thing" and then thing is something that is observably not happening.
- cturner 5y ago
  The purpose of economics is to explain complex interaction between systems. Analogy is a powerful communication tool. Such phrases allow us to communicate and reason about systems. The concepts raise the standard of policy development. Consider how much easier it is to discuss a proposal thanks to 'The Tragedy of the Commons'. Those few words serve as a shorthand for a dynamic. Without it you might need to spend half an hour stepping people through the dynamic each time you wanted to refer to it, and you would lose people along the way.
- loki49152 5y ago
  Assuming the rationality of economic actors goes wrong primarily because economists don’t know what “rationality” is and come up with weird accounts for what “rational” behavior would be under given circumstances. They aren’t talking about “rational” behavior in the sense laymen use the term. The “invisible hand” is also something that actually does exist and is straightforward to explain. It’s the tendency individuals making decisions in their own self-interest to find others with compatible self-interest as the motivation to make a trade. Every mutually self-interested transaction adds up to a total gain for the overall economy because each side makes the trade precisely because they judge the other’s offer to be of higher value to them. The key to demystifying the observation is the insight that “value” is a judgement made by individuals in relation to their own lives, not some inherent property that can be determined apart from individuals value judgements.

roenxi 5y ago

Economics is an extremely political science, a lot of common knowledge about what economists believe/predict/do is probably wrong. There is about as much visibility into what economics actually predicts as into physics, mathematics or any other science. Most economics is quoted to try and score points in political debates where the lines are already drawn, conclusions already reached and people are mainly looking for tools to push their preferred solution. In such an environment, you might expect to see an enormous amount of very low quality economics content - probably full of motivated reasoning if you look for it. It doesn't say much about the state of the field, more about how hard it is to find the field in amongst the dross. Eg, it is reasonably clear that most people writing about about Marxism or Keynesianism haven't read Marx or Keynes wrote.