4 ms·
Economics is an arena full of entrenched interests who exploit information asymmetry and regulatory capture to compete, at multiple scale factors. It is my stro
by mikewarot 5y ago
Economics is an arena full of entrenched interests who exploit information asymmetry and regulatory capture to compete, at multiple scale factors. It is my strongly held opinion that rational analysis of "Economics" is not possible.
You've got the global scale, where nations compete, best described by Beau of the Fifth Column as a game of poker where everyone cheats to gain power.
You've got the corporate scale, where the boards of directors are political and overlap across most of the Fortune 500. Legally they are supposed to act in the Fiduciary interest of investors, but that is a polite fiction.
You've got the competing oligarchs, both foreign and domestic, engaged in their own egocentric excesses.
You've got the financial sector, which has distorted the price of money so hard that it effectively swallowed the economy, that the price signal is as effective as light trying to exit a black hole.
Not to mention the high frequency trading shenanigan's, where front running the market is accepted practice, bots with some huge bugs are given control over billions of dollars.
Oh, and the derivatives market, in which any corporation might have off the books obligations that exceed the annual sum of the world economy.
Economics is truly the dismal science.
PS: I fear I've been too optimistic in my outlook. ;-)
- roenxi 5y agoTo attach some further cynicism to this comment: The going rate to buy a "respectable" politician appears to be donations in the $10k to $1 million range. Buying an economist is going to be much cheaper than that. Anyone with a bit of money behind them can pay for any sort of economics they like. Note that many famous economists are vulnerable to financial or political influence. It is not a safe field for uncovering facts about reality without being a confidently independent thinker and researcher.
- ChadNauseam 5y agoI don't think your logic works. It ought to be very cheap to buy a climate scientist too, but despite that the oil industry has failed to produce a substantial number of climate scientists who don't say anthropogenic climate change is real. Economists have broad agreement on issues like rent control (they don't like it) and carbon pricing (they do like it), and that still counts for something.
- bannedbybros 5y ago
- netizen-936824 5y agoProbably because all of the climate scientists with half of a brain can tell that selling out to oil corporations means selling out the future of humanity. It isn't so obvious what consequences bad economics has
- aj7 5y agoThey’ve had a TON. But they have zero credibility.
- jonahbenton 5y agoThis is the correct answer.
- rramadass 5y agoDang! And i thought i had a very bleak view of Economics :-) PS: https://finance.yahoo.com/news/12-meanest-things-nassim-taleb-170253106.html https://finance.yahoo.com/news/12-meanest-things-nassim-tale...
- SantalBlush 5y agoMost of what you've described here is about politics and finance, not economics. Econ has pretty much nothing to do with sitting on a board or high-frequency trading. HN is full of users who don't know what econ is but want to explain how wrong it is to one another. It's like a parody of itself.
- stevenhuang 5y agoBut taking "economics" in isolation like this ignores much of what actually happens in reality (the politics part). It's a large part of why economics as a field is made fun of when its models are too simplistic to accurately describe reality.
- SantalBlush 5y agoYou're just piling one non-sequitur on top of another. The question on this thread is "How can I learn macroeconomics properly?" The comment to which I replied was an uninformed diatribe that doesn't even come close to answering the question. Now you're doubling down on it. When someone is asking how to learn economics, it would be helpful to take it more "in isolation" instead of regurgitating the same complaints that we see on HN and don't even answer the question.
- stevenhuang 5y agoYou can learn economics to learn economics, sure that's not in dispute. But the OP's original premise was to learn economics _to become a better investor_. If both our comments are non-sequitor to you, consider it's you who lost the plot.
- SantalBlush 5y agoOther people have effectively addressed the disconnect between learning econ and investing; the comment to which I replied did not at all. So no, I did not lose the plot.
- 5y ago