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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 bel
by 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 agoMicroeconomics is scientific… in theory!
- __del__ 4y agodo 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 agoI 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 agoObviously not.
- kolbe 4y agoI think the term "hard science" is squishy enough to where you both can argue in good faith, but have a different definition in-mind. I agree that Econ doesn't quite have the hardness of say Physics, but insofar as you can characterize physics as the development of models that can meaningfully explain reality within reasonable error bounds and feasible energy usage, then Microeconomics sometimes does do this as well.
- geysersam 4y agoMicroeconomics is math. But science requires something more than math. A theory motivating why a certain mathematical structure should manifest in reality and describe our observations. In the case of economics such a theory would be something like "people are rational actor optimizing some quantity". This is however *highly* controversial and many of the predictions such a theory makes contradicts observation.
- BurningFrog 4y agoI'm not an Economist, but my impression is that the predictions of microeconomics have vast practical applications and the cases where they fail are few, but of course they get a lot of attention, just like happens in Physics or any science. To be less jargon-y, microeconomics is sometimes called "price theory", and in its basic form models prices as depending on supply and demand.
- littlestymaar 4y agoMicroeconomics study the interaction of marginal costs with the demand curve, too bad that in real life marginal cost is undefined (and the demand curve doesn't exist in a vacuum).
- pixl97 4y ago"People are rational actors at optimizing quantity X, unless they are made aware of what quantity X is". Economics seems to break under Goodhart's Law.
- floathub 4y agoAt the risk of some meta-irony, important to point out that Goodhart was an economist.
- nybble41 4y agoPeople are rational actors at optimizing their own well-being, as they see it. That holds in all cases but it isn't very helpful to the politicians. What breaks is trying to get people to optimize for some other factor by manipulating economic signals (e.g. with inflation). Once they know about the manipulation they'll compensate for it. Not 100%, not always even in the right direction, but enough to make the eventual outcome chaotic.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- littlestymaar 4y ago> Microeconomics is a solid Hard Science And what's you opinion on astrology? FYI microeconomics is the most controversial part of economics. Doing advanced math on abismally poor world models doesn't make a hard science, especially when none od your results are falsifiable…