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I also have a degree in economics and I was raised by two professors of economics and in my young life was surrounded by Nobel laureates in economics and have b

• yanderekko 5y ago
  >Our public policy would probably better served if most of the profession was put on a cruise ship and launched out to sea. Ah, the Khmer Rouge strategy. I wonder how that worked out.. It's not a coincidence that the "Nirvana fallacy" concept was coined by an economist.
  • CPLX 5y ago
    • jancsika 5y ago
      Oh my-- I wish there were a button here called "flag if no follow up" In other words-- you have got to make your case for Larry Summers causing more human suffering, or at least link to someone who has written that polemic. Perhaps to improve UX there should be a 10 minute countdown to the flag being triggered. :)
      • CPLX 5y ago
        Well where should we start. How about right here in the present where he's responsible for the current war in Ukraine. First Google result: https://cepr.net/can-we-blame-larry-summers-for-the-collapse-of-russia/ https://cepr.net/can-we-blame-larry-summers-for-the-collapse... There's more. Lots more. It's so much worse than you think.
        • yanderekko 5y ago
          Even if one conceded (and it's conceding a lot) that Summers was involved in bad things, one needs to consider the counterfactual. In a world where Summers had died in childhood, are we imagining that the USSR would not have collapsed? Where this collapse would've lead to some sort of social democratic paradise? Or what? I mean, people aren't seriously arguing this, are they?
          • CPLX 5y ago
            People are arguing that our post-Soviet policy was fucking insane and that Summers was a chief architect of it. It was wholesale looting that set world stability back for generations and it was justified on principles of mainstream neoliberal economics and implemented by that community's (at the time) golden child. It was one of several fundamentally catastrophic decisions of economic policy made in the 1990's that have their roots very firmly in academic economic orthodoxy. If anything I'm understating how bad it was and how much needless human misery was unleashed from this community of sociopaths.
            • yanderekko 5y ago
              You're dodging the question. If Summers weren't around, how do you think events would have played out instead? If you'd conflate between Summers' influence and the overall influence of neoliberal ideology, that's really not fair. (And full disclosure, I think this goes both ways - everything bad that happened in Cambodia cannot be ascribed to Pol Pot, but I think there's a much better argument for his having a very personalized impact on these events than there is for Summers and the collapse of the USSR.)
    • quicklycreated 5y ago
      • CPLX 5y ago
        I mean if you're going to do a proper analysis of someone's contribution to human misery you're going to probably need to start counting how many dead children each of the contestants has been responsible for and the number for Larry Summers is definitely not zero.
        • quicklycreated 5y ago
          • CPLX 5y ago
            Yeah and how did the current greedy/evil bastard get in power? I have no great love for Russia and don't believe at all in the idea that the U.S. or the west in general is the source of all the misery in the world. I think it's pretty clear there are some malignant actors in the world and China and Russia are foremost among them. But you might want to look into American post-Soviet collapse policy before you get too far over your skis.
          • eli_gottlieb 5y ago
            >the country whose history they've fetishized their entire lives is irredeemably evil. Dude I hate Russia, but it's not irredeemably evil. That's some cultural essentialist bullshit right there.
            • quicklycreated 5y ago
              [flagged]
        • johnny22 5y ago
          maybe i missed it, but a lot of folks are likely to care about intent. Even if larry summers is responsible, did he mean to? I think you'll have trouble pressing your argument even if it is true, even if the amount of dead is 10x that just because of intent.
    • yanderekko 5y ago
      >Had to think about it for a second didn't you. No, no reasonable person had to think about it for a second..
      • CPLX 5y ago
        Michael: My father’s no different from any other powerful man. Any man who’s responsible for other people. Like a senator or president. Kay: You know how naïve you sound? Senators and presidents don’t have men killed. Michael: Oh. Who’s being naïve, Kay?
    • ch4s3 5y ago
      No, I didn’t. The Khmer Rouge killed 2 million people in 4 years, fully 1/4 of the population. The preferred weapon of execution for much of that time was the pickax. It’s a disgusting comparison to make, and I don’t like Larry Summers at all.
      • CPLX 5y ago
        Pop quiz, if you had to go would you pick a pick axe or starvation?
        • ch4s3 5y ago
          There are two major things wrong with this line of argument. It is a bad way to judge moral actions. It is in arguable that ordering the murder of 2 million people is a worse moral action than arguing for bad economic policy. The second is that I don't think there's a very good line from Summers' policies to any mass starvation/famine. Every famine since 1990 except in North Korea has been the result of a war.
    • FastMonkey 5y ago
      If you ever visited the killing fields in Cambodia, you'd never make a statement like that. A sub-optimal economic policy isn't even on the same measurement scale as the raw, senseless, brutal cruelty and violence of that regime.
      • CPLX 5y ago
        I spent a week in Phnom Penh around 20 years ago and the experience of walking through Tuol Sleng prison is one of the most affecting and enduring memories I have. Nothing I am saying diminishes that as an expression of profound evil. The question I've got though is why you're here minimizing the raw, senseless, brutal cruelty of 1990s neoliberal economic policies. Just because you can't see pictures at the visitors center doesn't mean the misery is any less profound.
• sokoloff 5y ago
  I have probably 5-10% of the economics education you have, but am surprised that you’d single out micro as being the part of economics that disconnects with observed reality. (My perception is that micro matches well at least some of the time with observation, and beats the economics average.)
  • CPLX 5y ago
    Fair enough. I amend my statement to admit that both sides of the profession are equally fucking corrupt.
    • deleted 5y ago
      [deleted]
• throwaway73838 5y ago
  THANK YOU. Finally someone who gets it. We are being taken for a ride, by people who prey on and actively promote ignorance. Economics is an incredibly simple discipline for anyone with more than half a brain, and an interest in learning something new. Unfortunately, we’re essentially living in the dark ages.
• tomrod 5y ago
  Respectfully, I don't agree with your opinion on the economics profession. Perhaps having generationally fresh eyes (I come from a humble background), rather than it being ever present in my formative years generates the difference in perspective. In my view, the economics academic profession is no more or less corrupt than other academics, and I can't hazard to judge the industry side beyond my own experience.
  • giraffe_lady 5y ago
    I think they mean corrupt as in necessarily compromised by knowingly adding so much misery to the world. Not the other more common sense of like, participating in graft, bribes etc. I don't think there's any reason to think economists do more of that than the average.
    • tomrod 5y ago
      That's not a common usage of "corrupt", I think?
  • imtringued 5y ago
    You're right. Nutritional science of the 70s is so corrupt it is almost funny if it hadn't doomed millions into obesity.
  • Gibbon1 5y ago
    I read a paper that investigated the attempts by the fossil fuel companies to head off efforts to stop global warming. By corrupting not just climate scientist profession but also economists. The former was almost impossible. Economists however took the bribes.
• SantalBlush 5y ago
  >Our public policy would probably better served if most of the profession was put on a cruise ship and launched out to sea. Just saying. Economic policy will be made, whether we like it or not. This policy must be based on some type of model, whether that model is simple or complex. So here's the question: do you have a falsifiable, demonstrably better model than one of those used in mainstream economics? If so, you can simply show it to us. If not, then we're sticking with one of the models used in mainstream econ. This goes for every single complaint about economics being "corrupt". Show us your better model. If you can't, well then, it doesn't matter.
  • giraffe_lady 5y ago
    "The need for a status quo is so powerful that we must preserve the status quo at all costs" is there more to it than that because I really can't find anything else here. The current approach is abhorrent because of its effects on human lives today and needs to be ended for that reason. No one here is the author of the future and it's not their responsibility to present a vision of it that you will accept before you acknowledge horrors that exist now.
    • CPLX 5y ago
      What this guy said.
    • SantalBlush 5y ago
      If the current approach is ended, it will be replaced with something, even if that is a laissez-faire "we don't know, so just let it sort itself out" approach. Will that something result in fewer horrors than those that exist now? The onus is definitely on the persons wanting change to make an actual case for that change. So yes, it is their responsibility to present a vision of their alternative future that I will accept.
      • CPLX 5y ago
        > The onus is definitely on the persons wanting change to make an actual case for that change No it's not. The onus is on the people who created policies that lead to massive inequality and human misery to explain why we shouldn't string them up as an example to others.
• notahacker 5y ago
  I also have a degree in economics and think if you average out the two opinions upthread you get closer to the truth :) (No but seriously, rational expectations works pretty well in the limited sense of showing that economic models making other assumptions about how human behaviour expect humans to persistently make systematic errors that there's usually no justification for. It's of no value in understanding human behaviour and rather limited value in predictive modelling, especially when it emerges as the assumption that expectations are always correct in their priors, as opposed to the assumption that they eventually adapt to making random rather than systematic error. Similarly the New Keynesian paradigm is pretty good at showing that even in idealised market conditions it only takes one bit of friction to create a situation where economic stimulus results in less economic pain than letting the economy sort itself out, but if you're actually trying to predict the size of the stimulus required by estimating menu costs you're doing it wrong. Since the New Keynesians managed to adapt their models to the Lucas critique whilst having quite different policy preferences to Lucas himself, it's also pretty clear that the allegiance to models isn't blind and economists are perfectly capable of formulating different proposals for better and for worse despite rather than because of modelling orthodoxy)
  • tomrod 5y ago
    Hear hear!
• specialist 5y ago
  I know almost nothing about economics. Yet I was flabberghasted when I read that some very influentual economists explicitly reject empiricism. Um, ok. Does that mean they're arguing about how things should be, if only everyone was rational like them? Versus, oh I don't know, getting all scientific, and try to understand how things really are, be able to make predictions, and then maybe test one's theories. Just a thought. Is that the kind of corruption you're talking about?