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I'd bet in 50 or 100 years economics will be regarded as the astrology of our times.
by pid-1 5y ago
I'd bet in 50 or 100 years economics will be regarded as the astrology of our times.
- tomrod 5y agoDoubtful. Economics is the source of many methodologies in game theory, mechanism design, behavioral game theory, much of political science and voting theory, and has quite imperialistic methods such that quantitative accounting and financial engineering use econometric modeling. Not to mention RCT, causal inference, GIS, and machine learning applications have a lot of conceptual overlap. A safer bet would be that people in 50 or 100 years times will be expecting people in 100 years time to regard it as astrology. Edit: good catch(es), mobile commenting and I missed a key phrase (source of many methodologies).
- disgruntledphd2 5y ago> Not to mention RCT, causal inference, GIS, and machine learning applications RCT's were developed by psychologists (for educational purposes) and promoted by medical statisticians. Causal inference was essentially invented by a computer scientist. You can definitely thank geographers for GIS, and ML is basically a rebranding of statistics by Comp Sci researchers. Game theory I'll definitely concede to economics, but political science is it's own discipline, and shouldn't be regarded as part of economics.
- huitzitziltzin 5y agoEconomists generally work in a framework which predates Judea Pearl’s work by at least half a century. Causal inference was not invented by a computer scientist.
- disgruntledphd2 5y agoDo you have some links please?
- tomrod 5y agoRubin model / Rubin-Neyman model https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rubin_causal_model https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rubin_causal_model Pearl credits it in The Book of Why.
- jameshart 5y agoEconomics is the source of political science? Plato would be surprised to learn that.
- tomrod 5y agoPlato didn't call it political science ;) He falls more into political theory anyhow. But to clarify my original point, the methodologies of economics are imperialistic.
- Retric 5y agoEven we accept your premise, that doesn’t mean Economics its self is actually accurate or useful. At a minimum in 100 years I expect current macroeconomic theory to get as much respect as phrenology does. One of the basic failures is you can’t abstract away the underlying mechanics of societies. Changing the federal funds rate doesn’t help if your in the Zombie apocalypse movie. Granted in the real world you might be dealing with drought, soldiers, or empty oil wells rather than Zombies, but the same basic mismatch still applies.
- imtringued 5y agoEconomics changed during the great depression it is about to change very soon or we just reset everything and redo the 80 year gold standard cycle. The latter is quite boring and solves nothing.
- ajsnigrutin 5y agoModern physics (a part of) isn't much better... it's basically throwing stuff at the wall, and seeing what comes out.
- 1980phipsi 5y agoEven if they are both about predicting a distribution, you can set up an experiment to isolate an effect and make the distribution more-or-less static over time. Distributions in economics change over time. People react to what other people are doing, sometimes in very non-linear ways. It makes it a hard subject and a different beast than physics.
- socksset 5y agoPhlogiston theory always comes to mind for me. I think we will see these fields as attempts at science while completely lacking the instruments to properly study the field so all kinds of nonsense conclusions were drawn. Economics though is so especially perverted because of monetary incentives for economists. A somewhat correct prediction is worth so much but terrible predictions don't really harm much at all. "It is economics!?! It is stochastic, the coin came up heads, not my fault. The theory is still correct". Or maybe in 50 years we will just have an honest econ textbook that is just a 1 page pamphlet that says "When the stock market goes down, print money. Make up everything else as you go along to justify this".
- Mikeb85 5y agoNah, economics is extremely useful. I've put many economic principles to good use in business and life. The problem is when people try to reduce problems to a single model. It's fine when you're learning in the first couple years, but the world is complicated. And the best economists I know work for banks and are pretty sophisticated when it comes to coding n things.