3 ms·

Do economists share any culpability here? I thought their job was to apply their sharp minds and apply "systems" to achieve certain goals (not limited to addres

Do economists share any culpability here? I thought their job was to apply their sharp minds and apply "systems" to achieve certain goals (not limited to addressing poverty). What if we compare it to other sciences? Say we didn't understand flight as well as we do, and we have this problem where planes keep crashing, maybe 2-3 a year (like it was in the 1980s-1990s) and instead of getting to the bottom of it and fixing the underlying problem, aerospace engineers and expert pilots just shrugged their shoulders, "whelp, that sucks.." and kept up the status quo? What if in the late '70s this new virus started spreading among gay men, and doctors just shrugged and said "well we can treat the symptoms and make our best guess how to avoid it, but damned if I know what's going on..."? How long would we keep awarding academic medals, increasing professors' salaries (and of course tuition), and lauding these doctors as heroes if they never advanced the state of their art? Why are economists shielded from a similar failure in their chosen profession?

dfxm12 3y ago
As the article suggests, the issue is with political policy. Economists don't implement political policy. Politicians do.
- gosub100 3y ago
  So there's a theory/program that will end poverty (because the brilliant minds in economics thought of/simulated/tested it?) but politicians won't allow it to be implemented? I'm not implying anything with that question, please answer directly.
wavemode 3y ago
People often get this wrong. The goal of economics is not to fix economic systems, any more than the goal of psychology is to make the human mind perfect, or the goal of political science is to guarantee that your candidate wins every election. What these all have in common is they are merely descriptive sciences, not engineered solutions to specific problems. Understanding how something works currently, is not the same as having the tools to make it work better. To use a similar example to the one you gave - the common cold is one of the most common and well-studied illnesses known to man, but there is no vaccine for it. Lazy scientists? No, it's just that not every problem has an easy solution.
gruez 3y ago
>What if in the late '70s this new virus started spreading among gay men, and doctors just shrugged and said "well we can treat the symptoms and make our best guess how to avoid it, but damned if I know what's going on..."? How long would we keep awarding academic medals, increasing professors' salaries (and of course tuition), and lauding these doctors as heroes if they never advanced the state of their art? I mean, we still can't cure aids, nor can we cure cancer, and we still haven't figured out how to stop aging. If you cherry pick the right examples you can make any field seem like bunk.
- gosub100 3y ago
  I would say you're cherry picking. HIV went from death sentence to a nuisance. So again, I ask, why haven't economists made similar progress? I guess they just like winning medals and appearing elite, without actually contributing anything?
  - gruez 3y ago
    Well for one, in medicine you can run randomized trials across thousands or even millions of patients. The public don't want their economies turned into guinea pigs for economics experiments, so they have to stick with natural experiments, which greatly limits progress. A better comparison would be the public health response to covid-19. Even today we don't really know whether lockdowns were worth it or not. >I guess they just like winning medals and appearing elite, without actually contributing anything? Are they? some of the contributions listed here seem pretty important and non-trivial: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Nobel_Memorial_Prize_laureates_in_Economic_Sciences https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Nobel_Memorial_Prize_l...

dfxm12 3y ago

As the article suggests, the issue is with political policy. Economists don't implement political policy. Politicians do.

gosub100 3y ago
So there's a theory/program that will end poverty (because the brilliant minds in economics thought of/simulated/tested it?) but politicians won't allow it to be implemented? I'm not implying anything with that question, please answer directly.

wavemode 3y ago

People often get this wrong. The goal of economics is not to fix economic systems, any more than the goal of psychology is to make the human mind perfect, or the goal of political science is to guarantee that your candidate wins every election. What these all have in common is they are merely descriptive sciences, not engineered solutions to specific problems. Understanding how something works currently, is not the same as having the tools to make it work better. To use a similar example to the one you gave - the common cold is one of the most common and well-studied illnesses known to man, but there is no vaccine for it. Lazy scientists? No, it's just that not every problem has an easy solution.

gruez 3y ago

>What if in the late '70s this new virus started spreading among gay men, and doctors just shrugged and said "well we can treat the symptoms and make our best guess how to avoid it, but damned if I know what's going on..."? How long would we keep awarding academic medals, increasing professors' salaries (and of course tuition), and lauding these doctors as heroes if they never advanced the state of their art? I mean, we still can't cure aids, nor can we cure cancer, and we still haven't figured out how to stop aging. If you cherry pick the right examples you can make any field seem like bunk.

gosub100 3y ago
I would say you're cherry picking. HIV went from death sentence to a nuisance. So again, I ask, why haven't economists made similar progress? I guess they just like winning medals and appearing elite, without actually contributing anything?
- gruez 3y ago
  Well for one, in medicine you can run randomized trials across thousands or even millions of patients. The public don't want their economies turned into guinea pigs for economics experiments, so they have to stick with natural experiments, which greatly limits progress. A better comparison would be the public health response to covid-19. Even today we don't really know whether lockdowns were worth it or not. >I guess they just like winning medals and appearing elite, without actually contributing anything? Are they? some of the contributions listed here seem pretty important and non-trivial: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Nobel_Memorial_Prize_laureates_in_Economic_Sciences https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Nobel_Memorial_Prize_l...