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IMO, economics as a science is all about making up theories to 'scientifically' (but actually, just academically) justify whatever the ruling powers want to do.

by bsedlm 4y ago

IMO, economics as a science is all about making up theories to 'scientifically' (but actually, just academically) justify whatever the ruling powers want to do. In a larger sense, academia and a big chunk of contemporary western "culture" is all about coming up with stories, narratives, explanations, mindsets (frameworks) to ignore the exploitation of humans as a resource for the sake of ill-defined (by design) notions of "the group" or "us all" when in fact the end result is a big hierarchical pyramid with little room at the top which requires lots and lots of desperate people at the bottom (by this point, the bottom is entire countries).

deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
m12k 4y ago
The problem is that economics as a field spans from sociology and mass-psychology (almost impossible reason about, fully quantify or prove anything in a scientific manner) to mathematics (easy to reason about, model and publish results - but at the risk of not actually modeling the real world). The incentives of the academic world nudges researchers toward the math side of the field, but the risk in that is that the field becomes disconnected from reality.
- ur-whale 4y ago
  > the risk in that is that the field becomes disconnected from reality it's not a risk, it's a measurable fact.
  - slothtrop 4y ago
    What's the measure?
    - guerrilla 4y ago
      The fact that it doesn't make predictions any more reliably than astrology.
      - ur-whale 4y ago
        >The fact that it doesn't make predictions any more reliably than astrology. yup. Physics: apply force F to projectile of mass M and know in advance where and when it'll land modulo a tiny error margin. Economics: raise the interest rates by X%, wait unknown amount of time Y, observe state of the system after time Y, formulate complex theory as to why action led to "cause", go write a paper about it. Get wined and dined by policy makers who see great benefit in your "explanation". The phenomenon is not new BTW, oracle, druids and shamans have occupied that ecological niche for as long as there has been tribes and leaders needing to justify their actions to the masses. They just changed their names in the 20th century to sound more respectable.
      - slothtrop 4y ago
        Were it reduced to "predictions". It isn't. And people take for granted a lot of popular concepts borne of the study as though it was always known. E.g. the relationship between interest rates & exchange rates, supply and demand, etc.
        guerrilla 4y ago
        Any "science" that can't reliably make reliably make predictions isn't a science. That's the litmus test.
        slothtrop 4y ago
        You've just eliminated all social sciences, by your metric of "reliably". edit: your take-away from this should be that you're mis-defining science. edit2: you all forgot that medical and nutritional science has a reproducibility crisis, it's no less "science" for it. Add to the fact, the notion that nothing is reproducible in Economics is false. See for example: https://www.caltech.edu/about/news/famous-economics-experiment-reproduced-thousands-times https://www.caltech.edu/about/news/famous-economics-experime... , https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.aaf0918 https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.aaf0918
        4y ago
- goodpoint 4y ago
  > sociology and mass-psychology (almost impossible reason about, fully quantify or prove anything in a scientific manner) On the contrary, sociology is way more scientific than economics in building probabilistic models of social behaviors. Such models are quantitative and testable. Economics is opinion based by design.
  - bobcostas55 4y ago
    This is complete nonsense, economics is by far the strongest social science field in terms of empirical methodology. Pretty much all the modern causal inference methods were developed in econometrics. Try taking a look at the big econ journals (like Journal of Political Economy, American Economic Review, or Journal of Finance) and I assure you you won't find anything resembling arbitrary "opinions".
    - goodpoint 4y ago
      There is a simple method to disprove your wild claims that comes from system theory. Regardless of the field, be it economics, cookery or mechanical engineering, you can ask a pool of experts: - How can I solve problem X? What will happen if I do nothing? - How confident are you that the solution will be effective or the prediction will be accurate? The problem X is the input and then you compare predictions and real outputs. There is abundant literature on the effectiveness of economical models and the ability to make prediction and the outcomes are clear: - Economists systematically overestimate their ability to make predictions - There is not even a single economical theory. Economists have different schools of thought that are incompatible with each other (!) There are countless examples of economists failing to predict the future or having wildly different opinions.
      - slothtrop 4y ago
        > There is not even a single economical theory This applies to all social science. > There are countless examples of economists failing to predict the future or having wildly different opinions. This applies to all social science.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
bena 4y ago
The problem with economics is that every problem becomes a wicked problem. You just can't test your theories in a controlled manner. And everything has confounding factors.
- ur-whale 4y ago
  > The problem with economics is that every problem becomes a wicked problem. You just can't test your theories in a controlled manner. And everything has confounding factors. Or, to put it simply: economics is not a scientific discipline for any generally accepted definition of the term.
- tomrod 4y ago
  Esther Duflo won the Nobel prize for implementations of randomized controlled trials in a very non-wicked way. Experimental economics is a mature and active field.
  - bena 4y ago
    "Wicked" doesn't mean bad, it means there are inherent difficulties in testing and implementation. The Nobel Memorial Prize for Economics is what it is. Both Hayek and Friedman both won it, even though they have very different ideas about how the economy should be run. As did Paul Krugman. Yet I've seen no one mention his Nobel prize when it comes time to criticize him. Even looking at what her study that won her the Nobel showed: "Banerjee, Duflo and their co-authors concluded that students appeared to learn nothing from additional days at school. Neither did spending on textbooks seem to boost learning, even though the schools in Kenya lacked many essential inputs. Moreover, in the Indian context Banerjee and Duflo intended to study, many children appeared to learn little: in results from field tests in the city of Vadodara fewer than one in five third-grade students could correctly answer first-grade curriculum math test questions." You can only get those results by implementing the solution. You can only know it doesn't work by trying it and seeing it doesn't work. That's part of what makes the problem wicked. And unlike one of the people who responded who wanted to use my statement as support for saying economics is not a "real science". What it really means, is that this shit is hard because it is incredibly hard to conduct experiments in ways that don't irreparably harm some group.
pydry 4y ago
This is because the money and prestige is in academically justify the ruling powers and economists are simply rational agents engaged in maximizing their personal utility. There's more money in demonstrating that raising the minimum wage destroys jobs than there is in demonstrating that it destroys profits.
AussieWog93 4y ago
I will never understand why ideas like this - both completely detached from reality and actively harmful to the people who espouse them - have become so popular on Reddit.
- HWR_14 4y ago
  There are a couple of orthogonal ideas in there, so I don't know what you're referring to. That economists isn't a science? That most economists are propagandists? That human societies tend to form a pyramid?
  - AussieWog93 4y ago
    The main idea that I took offence to was the "economic incel" ideology - ie that the our entire society is nothing more than a tool for siphoning resources from the "underclass" into the hands of a few dozen multi-billionaires, and therefore if one engages in any productive activity beyond the absolute minimum necessary to survive, they're a sucker. It's popular on various front-page(!!!) subreddits like r/antiwork and r/latestagecapitalism. I say "incel" there very deliberately. It's a set of toxic beliefs that prevents the formation of normal, healthy economic relationships, and this reinforces the toxic beliefs in a positive feedback loop. I've seen a friend get sucked into this and it was (still is) absolutely devastating.
    - chillacy 4y ago
      The worst part is that it’s entirely narrative, so not really disprovable in the same way that “it is raining outside right now” is. And it is like you said self fulfilling, where the world makes more sense the less economic success one has, and the narrative provides no moral option to changing one’s economic status within the system.
      - AussieWog93 4y ago
        >the narrative provides no moral option to changing one’s economic status within the system. This is where my friend is right now. It really, really sucks.
Enginerrrd 4y ago
This type of thinking is exactly what led to mass starvation in the Soviet economy. It turns out, markets are really good at figuring a LOT of that out. Planned economies are probably computationally infeasible even with vastly simplifying assumptions.
- q-big 4y ago
  > This type of thinking is exactly what led to mass starvation in the Soviet economy. In this case, the problem was indeed that Soviet "scientists" - as bsedlm postulates - "were making up theories to 'scientifically' (but actually, just academically) justify whatever the ruling powers want to do" - in this case lysenkoism: > https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lysenkoism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lysenkoism
- brodouevencode 4y ago
  Tangent here: how do arbitrary, mass decisions differ when they are done independently versus when they are done in the open? Looking at this from the perspective of 'mob rule' which frequently makes very bad decisions.
  - Enginerrrd 4y ago
    Because markets are actually making a LOT of different decisions with incredible granularity and specificity across time and many other metrics. This is essentially computationally infeasible to do in a centralized way even if you make many simplifying assumptions. It can go wrong of course! But there essentially is no alternative that is even close to working.
    - brodouevencode 4y ago
      But those decisions are done in a fairly isolated fashion, i.e. you don't know what your neighbor is doing.
- confidantlake 4y ago
  There was mass starvation in Russia under the Czars too.
codelorado 4y ago
There is a kernel of truth in there, I'll give you that. It is hard to extract social sciences from the zeitgeist. But let's call a spade a spade: this is just another iteration of Marxist epistemological ideas. For Marx, the division between the proletariat and the bourgeoisie was much deeper than exploitation. Bourgeois had their own unsound systems of intertwined knowledge built to benefit their position in society. Not to be flippant, but that's how forced re-education was morally justified by socialist regimes of the 20th century.
- boppo1 4y ago
  I don't understand why this comment is almost downvoted to oblivion.
BurningFrog 4y ago
To me, this kind of thought is mostly equivalent to creationists who say Evolution "is just a theory". When scientific findings contradict our strongly held beliefs, we often choose our beliefs. That said, it's important to separate Microeconomics and Macroeconomics. Microeconomics is a solid Hard Science which has helped us understand many important things. Macroeconomics, OTOH, is a very difficult field, in part because the object under study is aware of the findings, and adjusts to it.
- qcumberqr 4y ago
  Microeconomics is scientific… in theory!
- __del__ 4y ago
  do scientific findings contradict the notion that we are using economic theory to "ignore the exploitation of humans as a resource for the sake of ill-defined (by design) notions of 'the group' or 'us all?'"
- rmellow 4y ago
  "God was very harsh with economists, as in Economics, the atom thinks, speaks and reacts" - Delfim Netto, Brazilian economist.
- rilezg 4y ago
  I hard disagree. Economics (of any flavor) is as soft as any other social science. The field of economics can be a useful lens to help one understand the world and human behavior, but it relies too much on human behavior to be consistently testable in the same way as 'Hard Science'.
  - adamhp 4y ago
    > it relies too much on human behavior to be consistently testable Are psychology or sociology hard science?
    - lupire 4y ago
guerrilla 4y ago
Yeah, I think it's mostly that, but also as I just commented in another thread: > economics is a psuedoscience like all social sciences and astrology. They've predicted absolutely nothing of value. It's just people studying these things prior to them becoming scientific, like people did with alchemy and whatnot before chemistry.
stevenwoo 4y ago
Have you read Kim Stanley Robinson? This could be a paraphrase of "Anyway that's a large part of what economics is - people arbitrarily, or as a matter of taste, assigning numerical values to non-numerical things. And then pretending that they haven't just made the numbers up, which they have. Economics is like astrology in that sense, except that economics serves to justify the current power structure, and so it has a lot of fervent believers among the powerful." from Red Mars.
Aunche 4y ago
This is absurd. Economists devote their lives to academics, just to serve their former colleagues who are thousands of times richer than them? If you actually paid attention to real policy and the sort of policies economists actually want, you'd notice a huge disconnect.
- HWR_14 4y ago
  There is definitely a subset of economists who are hacks who advocate positions because they want to help some group and not because they think they are true, just as there were doctors who said smoking was fine.
- captainbland 4y ago
  I think there is a potential issue with funding/sponsorship bias leaking into the consensus of the field, as there is with any field. It's just that economics has ramifications for very core government policy in a way that most other fields don't. I agree that economists as individuals are working competently and in earnest, it's just that certain economists will find it harder to get funding than others and that could manifest as bias with potentially wide reaching implications.
- Kranar 4y ago
  This is absurd. Naturopaths devote their lives to health and medicine, just to serve their former colleagues who are hundreds of times richer than them? If you actually paid attention to real policy and the sort of practices naturopaths actually want, you'd notice a huge disconnect. ... A lot of people practice things that they feel genuine and sincere about and they can even build entire institutions around those practices... doesn't mean anything if what they're doing doesn't have a measurably positive impact and there doesn't need to be any malice involved whatsoever. If anything, the people I know who believe in homeopathy are among the nicest and most honest people who deeply care about health, and yet... they are still full of crap.
  - Aunche 4y ago
    OP is accusing economists of being pawns of the ruling class, which indicates a severe lack of understanding of the field. If your argument against naturopathy is a conspiracy theory about how naturopaths serving the wishes of the elite rather than scientific studies that debunk it, you also deserve to be ridiculed.
bryanlarsen 4y ago
This criticism is usually applied to MMT. MMT says that in times of inflation you should raise taxes. Nobody is doing that.
- RobertoG 4y ago
  That's not what MMT says. It says that excessive spending in the economy can create inflation. A possible way to compensate (not the only one) is to raise taxes. But it doesn't say that the only cause of inflation is excessive spending. That idea is a monetarist fantasy, who are able to keep saying that even in the middle of a pandemic, with a logistic collapse, an energy crisis and a major war. Still, they think that everything will be OK raising interest rates and taxes. Totally crazy. I'm curious to see what they will say if we see something a lot worse, deflation, in the next years.
- neilwilson 4y ago
  "This criticism is usually applied to MMT. MMT says that in times of inflation you should raise taxes. Nobody is doing that." Except that it doesn't say that. The basics of MMT analysis is that put forward by Warren Mosler in Argentina recently. [0] - Floating exchange rate - 0% interest rates and no further issuance of public debt - a guaranteed job for all at a fixed living wage Taxes are very much secondary in MMT analysis. The stabilisation comes from government refraining from giving people free money for doing nothing, which is what paying interest on debt and reserves represents. "As Mosler tirelessly repeated in his expositions, the price level of an economy, and therefore its level of inflation, can only be explained by the price that the State is willing to pay for the goods and services it needs to supply itself. This especially concerns the price of labour reflected in wages, since the origin of all goods and services is socially embodied human labour. " [0]: https://gimms.org.uk/2022/05/16/journey-to-the-heart-of-argentina/ https://gimms.org.uk/2022/05/16/journey-to-the-heart-of-arge...
  - bryanlarsen 4y ago
    That's Mosler's MMT, there are other MMT proposals which are closer to the path taken by the administration. Kelton's for example.
dash2 4y ago
When I see comments like this I just want to ask: could you do us a favour and name and explain a single economic theory? Let's start with the basics. In economics, what is "utility"?
- carapace 4y ago
  I'm not the person you're responding to, but I hold the opinion that economics isn't a science, that it's akin to numerology, and that it's social role is that of modern-day court astrologers. > In economics, what is "utility"? First result (using https://andisearch.com/ https://andisearch.com/ ): https://www.investopedia.com/terms/u/utility.asp https://www.investopedia.com/terms/u/utility.asp > Utility is a term in economics that refers to the total satisfaction received from consuming a good or service. Economic theories based on rational choice usually assume that consumers will strive to maximize their utility. The economic utility of a good or service is important to understand, because it directly influences the demand, and therefore price, of that good or service. In practice, a consumer's utility is impossible to measure and quantify. However, some economists believe that they can indirectly estimate what is the utility for an economic good or service by employing various models. Circular definition, "impossible to measure", "indirectly estimate", "various models"... Sounds like mumbo-jumbo with math to me. "Utility" isn't a scalar value, or a vector, or even a matrix. It's got to be a higher-order tensor or some even more exotic mathematical object, eh? > I remember my friend Johnny von Neumann used to say, "With four parameters I can fit an elephant, and with five I can make him wiggle his trunk." ~Fermi
  - dash2 4y ago
    So to sum up, you don't know what utility is, you've looked it up on investopedia, and on the basis of a web page, and your own entirely mistaken imagination of what the maths might be, you're gonna pontificate? I think you're proving my point!
    - carapace 4y ago
      > you don't know what utility is I don't think anyone does. > you've looked it up on investopedia, and on the basis of a web page Is that definition wrong? Can you provide a better definition or link? > your own entirely mistaken imagination of what the maths might be But I do know what math is, eh? And I know how to use it to do things like design electronic circuits that work "like it says on the tin". Do economists have anything like Ohm's law? Can you describe the math? Does it makes predictions? How can it make predictions when there are no empirical ways to measure e.g. the "utility"?
sleepdreamy 4y ago
I mean...sort of? You're right about everything...but the way you portray it is..not so black and white. Life is quite nuanced.
- ypeterholmes 4y ago
  Life is certainly nuanced, but complexity is more often leveraged to justify corruption than it is the cause of failure.
jtolmar 4y ago
I think if you divided economists up into two groups, with A including all the economists with popular media platforms or who work in government policy, and with B including the rest, those stuck in academia writing papers that only other economists ever read, then you would find that group A fits your quip very nicely, and group B does not.
- littlestymaar 4y ago
  Group B would probably be split in one bigger group that fits and another smaller one that doesn't.
- engineeringwoke 4y ago
  Is it somehow righteous for academics to study self-referential things that their offspring then go to study in perpetuity? For example, money holes like string theory haven't produced any major breakthroughs, and in fact, that is by design. Chipping away at the near infinite scope of the infinite problem is good for writing papers to get PhDs. It is not good for science, or human progress.
ramblenode 4y ago
> IMO, economics as a science is all about making up theories to 'scientifically' (but actually, just academically) justify whatever the ruling powers want to do. I see this with macroeconomics, but economics is still a fairly broad field. Microeconomics has the spherical cow problem but econometrics has many useful applications, as does game theory. A piece of evidence to your point is who quant firms hire: a lot more physics and math PhDs than economists. You would think someone who studies the science of the economy would be good at making money, but the real economy doesn't seem to care as much about those theories.

by bsedlm 4y ago

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

m12k 4y ago

The problem is that economics as a field spans from sociology and mass-psychology (almost impossible reason about, fully quantify or prove anything in a scientific manner) to mathematics (easy to reason about, model and publish results - but at the risk of not actually modeling the real world). The incentives of the academic world nudges researchers toward the math side of the field, but the risk in that is that the field becomes disconnected from reality.

ur-whale 4y ago
> the risk in that is that the field becomes disconnected from reality it's not a risk, it's a measurable fact.
- slothtrop 4y ago
  What's the measure?
  - guerrilla 4y ago
    The fact that it doesn't make predictions any more reliably than astrology.
    - ur-whale 4y ago
      >The fact that it doesn't make predictions any more reliably than astrology. yup. Physics: apply force F to projectile of mass M and know in advance where and when it'll land modulo a tiny error margin. Economics: raise the interest rates by X%, wait unknown amount of time Y, observe state of the system after time Y, formulate complex theory as to why action led to "cause", go write a paper about it. Get wined and dined by policy makers who see great benefit in your "explanation". The phenomenon is not new BTW, oracle, druids and shamans have occupied that ecological niche for as long as there has been tribes and leaders needing to justify their actions to the masses. They just changed their names in the 20th century to sound more respectable.
    - slothtrop 4y ago
      Were it reduced to "predictions". It isn't. And people take for granted a lot of popular concepts borne of the study as though it was always known. E.g. the relationship between interest rates & exchange rates, supply and demand, etc.
      - guerrilla 4y ago
        Any "science" that can't reliably make reliably make predictions isn't a science. That's the litmus test.
        slothtrop 4y ago
        You've just eliminated all social sciences, by your metric of "reliably". edit: your take-away from this should be that you're mis-defining science. edit2: you all forgot that medical and nutritional science has a reproducibility crisis, it's no less "science" for it. Add to the fact, the notion that nothing is reproducible in Economics is false. See for example: https://www.caltech.edu/about/news/famous-economics-experiment-reproduced-thousands-times https://www.caltech.edu/about/news/famous-economics-experime... , https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.aaf0918 https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.aaf0918
        4y ago
goodpoint 4y ago
> sociology and mass-psychology (almost impossible reason about, fully quantify or prove anything in a scientific manner) On the contrary, sociology is way more scientific than economics in building probabilistic models of social behaviors. Such models are quantitative and testable. Economics is opinion based by design.
- bobcostas55 4y ago
  This is complete nonsense, economics is by far the strongest social science field in terms of empirical methodology. Pretty much all the modern causal inference methods were developed in econometrics. Try taking a look at the big econ journals (like Journal of Political Economy, American Economic Review, or Journal of Finance) and I assure you you won't find anything resembling arbitrary "opinions".
  - goodpoint 4y ago
    There is a simple method to disprove your wild claims that comes from system theory. Regardless of the field, be it economics, cookery or mechanical engineering, you can ask a pool of experts: - How can I solve problem X? What will happen if I do nothing? - How confident are you that the solution will be effective or the prediction will be accurate? The problem X is the input and then you compare predictions and real outputs. There is abundant literature on the effectiveness of economical models and the ability to make prediction and the outcomes are clear: - Economists systematically overestimate their ability to make predictions - There is not even a single economical theory. Economists have different schools of thought that are incompatible with each other (!) There are countless examples of economists failing to predict the future or having wildly different opinions.
    - slothtrop 4y ago
      > There is not even a single economical theory This applies to all social science. > There are countless examples of economists failing to predict the future or having wildly different opinions. This applies to all social science.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]

bena 4y ago

The problem with economics is that every problem becomes a wicked problem. You just can't test your theories in a controlled manner. And everything has confounding factors.

ur-whale 4y ago
> The problem with economics is that every problem becomes a wicked problem. You just can't test your theories in a controlled manner. And everything has confounding factors. Or, to put it simply: economics is not a scientific discipline for any generally accepted definition of the term.
tomrod 4y ago
Esther Duflo won the Nobel prize for implementations of randomized controlled trials in a very non-wicked way. Experimental economics is a mature and active field.
- bena 4y ago
  "Wicked" doesn't mean bad, it means there are inherent difficulties in testing and implementation. The Nobel Memorial Prize for Economics is what it is. Both Hayek and Friedman both won it, even though they have very different ideas about how the economy should be run. As did Paul Krugman. Yet I've seen no one mention his Nobel prize when it comes time to criticize him. Even looking at what her study that won her the Nobel showed: "Banerjee, Duflo and their co-authors concluded that students appeared to learn nothing from additional days at school. Neither did spending on textbooks seem to boost learning, even though the schools in Kenya lacked many essential inputs. Moreover, in the Indian context Banerjee and Duflo intended to study, many children appeared to learn little: in results from field tests in the city of Vadodara fewer than one in five third-grade students could correctly answer first-grade curriculum math test questions." You can only get those results by implementing the solution. You can only know it doesn't work by trying it and seeing it doesn't work. That's part of what makes the problem wicked. And unlike one of the people who responded who wanted to use my statement as support for saying economics is not a "real science". What it really means, is that this shit is hard because it is incredibly hard to conduct experiments in ways that don't irreparably harm some group.

pydry 4y ago

This is because the money and prestige is in academically justify the ruling powers and economists are simply rational agents engaged in maximizing their personal utility. There's more money in demonstrating that raising the minimum wage destroys jobs than there is in demonstrating that it destroys profits.

AussieWog93 4y ago

I will never understand why ideas like this - both completely detached from reality and actively harmful to the people who espouse them - have become so popular on Reddit.

HWR_14 4y ago
There are a couple of orthogonal ideas in there, so I don't know what you're referring to. That economists isn't a science? That most economists are propagandists? That human societies tend to form a pyramid?
- AussieWog93 4y ago
  The main idea that I took offence to was the "economic incel" ideology - ie that the our entire society is nothing more than a tool for siphoning resources from the "underclass" into the hands of a few dozen multi-billionaires, and therefore if one engages in any productive activity beyond the absolute minimum necessary to survive, they're a sucker. It's popular on various front-page(!!!) subreddits like r/antiwork and r/latestagecapitalism. I say "incel" there very deliberately. It's a set of toxic beliefs that prevents the formation of normal, healthy economic relationships, and this reinforces the toxic beliefs in a positive feedback loop. I've seen a friend get sucked into this and it was (still is) absolutely devastating.
  - chillacy 4y ago
    The worst part is that it’s entirely narrative, so not really disprovable in the same way that “it is raining outside right now” is. And it is like you said self fulfilling, where the world makes more sense the less economic success one has, and the narrative provides no moral option to changing one’s economic status within the system.
    - AussieWog93 4y ago
      >the narrative provides no moral option to changing one’s economic status within the system. This is where my friend is right now. It really, really sucks.

Enginerrrd 4y ago

This type of thinking is exactly what led to mass starvation in the Soviet economy. It turns out, markets are really good at figuring a LOT of that out. Planned economies are probably computationally infeasible even with vastly simplifying assumptions.

q-big 4y ago
> This type of thinking is exactly what led to mass starvation in the Soviet economy. In this case, the problem was indeed that Soviet "scientists" - as bsedlm postulates - "were making up theories to 'scientifically' (but actually, just academically) justify whatever the ruling powers want to do" - in this case lysenkoism: > https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lysenkoism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lysenkoism
brodouevencode 4y ago
Tangent here: how do arbitrary, mass decisions differ when they are done independently versus when they are done in the open? Looking at this from the perspective of 'mob rule' which frequently makes very bad decisions.
- Enginerrrd 4y ago
  Because markets are actually making a LOT of different decisions with incredible granularity and specificity across time and many other metrics. This is essentially computationally infeasible to do in a centralized way even if you make many simplifying assumptions. It can go wrong of course! But there essentially is no alternative that is even close to working.
  - brodouevencode 4y ago
    But those decisions are done in a fairly isolated fashion, i.e. you don't know what your neighbor is doing.
confidantlake 4y ago
There was mass starvation in Russia under the Czars too.

codelorado 4y ago

There is a kernel of truth in there, I'll give you that. It is hard to extract social sciences from the zeitgeist. But let's call a spade a spade: this is just another iteration of Marxist epistemological ideas. For Marx, the division between the proletariat and the bourgeoisie was much deeper than exploitation. Bourgeois had their own unsound systems of intertwined knowledge built to benefit their position in society. Not to be flippant, but that's how forced re-education was morally justified by socialist regimes of the 20th century.

boppo1 4y ago
I don't understand why this comment is almost downvoted to oblivion.

BurningFrog 4y ago

To me, this kind of thought is mostly equivalent to creationists who say Evolution "is just a theory". When scientific findings contradict our strongly held beliefs, we often choose our beliefs. That said, it's important to separate Microeconomics and Macroeconomics. Microeconomics is a solid Hard Science which has helped us understand many important things. Macroeconomics, OTOH, is a very difficult field, in part because the object under study is aware of the findings, and adjusts to it.

qcumberqr 4y ago
Microeconomics is scientific… in theory!
__del__ 4y ago
do scientific findings contradict the notion that we are using economic theory to "ignore the exploitation of humans as a resource for the sake of ill-defined (by design) notions of 'the group' or 'us all?'"
rmellow 4y ago
"God was very harsh with economists, as in Economics, the atom thinks, speaks and reacts" - Delfim Netto, Brazilian economist.
rilezg 4y ago
I hard disagree. Economics (of any flavor) is as soft as any other social science. The field of economics can be a useful lens to help one understand the world and human behavior, but it relies too much on human behavior to be consistently testable in the same way as 'Hard Science'.
- adamhp 4y ago
  > it relies too much on human behavior to be consistently testable Are psychology or sociology hard science?
  - lupire 4y ago

guerrilla 4y ago

Yeah, I think it's mostly that, but also as I just commented in another thread: > economics is a psuedoscience like all social sciences and astrology. They've predicted absolutely nothing of value. It's just people studying these things prior to them becoming scientific, like people did with alchemy and whatnot before chemistry.

stevenwoo 4y ago

Have you read Kim Stanley Robinson? This could be a paraphrase of "Anyway that's a large part of what economics is - people arbitrarily, or as a matter of taste, assigning numerical values to non-numerical things. And then pretending that they haven't just made the numbers up, which they have. Economics is like astrology in that sense, except that economics serves to justify the current power structure, and so it has a lot of fervent believers among the powerful." from Red Mars.

Aunche 4y ago

This is absurd. Economists devote their lives to academics, just to serve their former colleagues who are thousands of times richer than them? If you actually paid attention to real policy and the sort of policies economists actually want, you'd notice a huge disconnect.

HWR_14 4y ago
There is definitely a subset of economists who are hacks who advocate positions because they want to help some group and not because they think they are true, just as there were doctors who said smoking was fine.
captainbland 4y ago
I think there is a potential issue with funding/sponsorship bias leaking into the consensus of the field, as there is with any field. It's just that economics has ramifications for very core government policy in a way that most other fields don't. I agree that economists as individuals are working competently and in earnest, it's just that certain economists will find it harder to get funding than others and that could manifest as bias with potentially wide reaching implications.
Kranar 4y ago
This is absurd. Naturopaths devote their lives to health and medicine, just to serve their former colleagues who are hundreds of times richer than them? If you actually paid attention to real policy and the sort of practices naturopaths actually want, you'd notice a huge disconnect. ... A lot of people practice things that they feel genuine and sincere about and they can even build entire institutions around those practices... doesn't mean anything if what they're doing doesn't have a measurably positive impact and there doesn't need to be any malice involved whatsoever. If anything, the people I know who believe in homeopathy are among the nicest and most honest people who deeply care about health, and yet... they are still full of crap.
- Aunche 4y ago
  OP is accusing economists of being pawns of the ruling class, which indicates a severe lack of understanding of the field. If your argument against naturopathy is a conspiracy theory about how naturopaths serving the wishes of the elite rather than scientific studies that debunk it, you also deserve to be ridiculed.

bryanlarsen 4y ago

This criticism is usually applied to MMT. MMT says that in times of inflation you should raise taxes. Nobody is doing that.

RobertoG 4y ago
That's not what MMT says. It says that excessive spending in the economy can create inflation. A possible way to compensate (not the only one) is to raise taxes. But it doesn't say that the only cause of inflation is excessive spending. That idea is a monetarist fantasy, who are able to keep saying that even in the middle of a pandemic, with a logistic collapse, an energy crisis and a major war. Still, they think that everything will be OK raising interest rates and taxes. Totally crazy. I'm curious to see what they will say if we see something a lot worse, deflation, in the next years.
neilwilson 4y ago
"This criticism is usually applied to MMT. MMT says that in times of inflation you should raise taxes. Nobody is doing that." Except that it doesn't say that. The basics of MMT analysis is that put forward by Warren Mosler in Argentina recently. [0] - Floating exchange rate - 0% interest rates and no further issuance of public debt - a guaranteed job for all at a fixed living wage Taxes are very much secondary in MMT analysis. The stabilisation comes from government refraining from giving people free money for doing nothing, which is what paying interest on debt and reserves represents. "As Mosler tirelessly repeated in his expositions, the price level of an economy, and therefore its level of inflation, can only be explained by the price that the State is willing to pay for the goods and services it needs to supply itself. This especially concerns the price of labour reflected in wages, since the origin of all goods and services is socially embodied human labour. " [0]: https://gimms.org.uk/2022/05/16/journey-to-the-heart-of-argentina/ https://gimms.org.uk/2022/05/16/journey-to-the-heart-of-arge...
- bryanlarsen 4y ago
  That's Mosler's MMT, there are other MMT proposals which are closer to the path taken by the administration. Kelton's for example.

dash2 4y ago

When I see comments like this I just want to ask: could you do us a favour and name and explain a single economic theory? Let's start with the basics. In economics, what is "utility"?

carapace 4y ago
I'm not the person you're responding to, but I hold the opinion that economics isn't a science, that it's akin to numerology, and that it's social role is that of modern-day court astrologers. > In economics, what is "utility"? First result (using https://andisearch.com/ https://andisearch.com/ ): https://www.investopedia.com/terms/u/utility.asp https://www.investopedia.com/terms/u/utility.asp > Utility is a term in economics that refers to the total satisfaction received from consuming a good or service. Economic theories based on rational choice usually assume that consumers will strive to maximize their utility. The economic utility of a good or service is important to understand, because it directly influences the demand, and therefore price, of that good or service. In practice, a consumer's utility is impossible to measure and quantify. However, some economists believe that they can indirectly estimate what is the utility for an economic good or service by employing various models. Circular definition, "impossible to measure", "indirectly estimate", "various models"... Sounds like mumbo-jumbo with math to me. "Utility" isn't a scalar value, or a vector, or even a matrix. It's got to be a higher-order tensor or some even more exotic mathematical object, eh? > I remember my friend Johnny von Neumann used to say, "With four parameters I can fit an elephant, and with five I can make him wiggle his trunk." ~Fermi
- dash2 4y ago
  So to sum up, you don't know what utility is, you've looked it up on investopedia, and on the basis of a web page, and your own entirely mistaken imagination of what the maths might be, you're gonna pontificate? I think you're proving my point!
  - carapace 4y ago
    > you don't know what utility is I don't think anyone does. > you've looked it up on investopedia, and on the basis of a web page Is that definition wrong? Can you provide a better definition or link? > your own entirely mistaken imagination of what the maths might be But I do know what math is, eh? And I know how to use it to do things like design electronic circuits that work "like it says on the tin". Do economists have anything like Ohm's law? Can you describe the math? Does it makes predictions? How can it make predictions when there are no empirical ways to measure e.g. the "utility"?

sleepdreamy 4y ago

I mean...sort of? You're right about everything...but the way you portray it is..not so black and white. Life is quite nuanced.

ypeterholmes 4y ago
Life is certainly nuanced, but complexity is more often leveraged to justify corruption than it is the cause of failure.

jtolmar 4y ago

I think if you divided economists up into two groups, with A including all the economists with popular media platforms or who work in government policy, and with B including the rest, those stuck in academia writing papers that only other economists ever read, then you would find that group A fits your quip very nicely, and group B does not.

littlestymaar 4y ago
Group B would probably be split in one bigger group that fits and another smaller one that doesn't.
engineeringwoke 4y ago
Is it somehow righteous for academics to study self-referential things that their offspring then go to study in perpetuity? For example, money holes like string theory haven't produced any major breakthroughs, and in fact, that is by design. Chipping away at the near infinite scope of the infinite problem is good for writing papers to get PhDs. It is not good for science, or human progress.

ramblenode 4y ago

> IMO, economics as a science is all about making up theories to 'scientifically' (but actually, just academically) justify whatever the ruling powers want to do. I see this with macroeconomics, but economics is still a fairly broad field. Microeconomics has the spherical cow problem but econometrics has many useful applications, as does game theory. A piece of evidence to your point is who quant firms hire: a lot more physics and math PhDs than economists. You would think someone who studies the science of the economy would be good at making money, but the real economy doesn't seem to care as much about those theories.