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I didn't dig beyond what was reported in this article, but my suspicion is that economic research will be excluded from these cuts. Assuming that to be true, th

I didn't dig beyond what was reported in this article, but my suspicion is that economic research will be excluded from these cuts. Assuming that to be true, that is where I'd expect to see a lot of social sciences research to be carried out. Some disciplines in the social sciences in recent years have taken a pretty hard turn towards qualitative methods and epistemologies that are either misaligned with or explicitly reject the scientific method. I think dropping funding for social sciences is a mistake, but at the same time (and I'm tipping my hand a bit here), the social sciences might benefit from a renewed emphasis on methods that can result in generalizable findings. I've read some case study / qualitative papers in recent years that, uh, do not give me the strong impression that some parts of the academy are serious stewards of the funding society entrusts to them. In short, I think a correction is warranted, but I hate to see it happen as part of a charged ideological / political process.

MichaelZuo 2y ago
Yeah even a sizable fraction of economic research is not credible enough to take at face value… let alone social sciences in general.
bb86754 2y ago
Agreed. But I don’t think economics is off the hook here either. To me it’s the social science that best masquerades as a “hard” science while still make huge jumps in logic that are rarely justified in the papers I’ve read.
- peatmoss 2y ago
  I studiously avoided making a normative statement that economics should take over this role. Any personal preferences I have here are separate from my beliefs about what I predict to happen. :-) I ~agree with you about the quality of econ papers. In some cases, I see the quantitative facility of econ papers as being better than similar studies executed by e.g. sociologists. But in some cases, flashy quant skills are used to distract from more fundamental issues. Assuming my prediction that social science research shifts to econ comes to pass, I think the natural pressure will be to drag econ's present quality bar downward.
  - graemep 2y ago
    > But in some cases, flashy quant skills are used to distract from more fundamental issues. I agree, I sometimes thing economists like quantitive approaches because it makes them feel like "real scientists" and numbers have an air of credibility. It look a lot of arguing to let my MSc dissertation supervisor let me do one on financial theory (which I am good at) rather than econometrics (which i struggled with).
    - BehindBlueEyes 2y ago
      Worst offenders of liking quant approches to feel like real scientists may be when psychologists use formulas to describe their theory like they're a mathematician. All it does is making their theories obtuse, while no math actually happens... I think the problem is more with the institutions and incentives e.g. to publish a lot for funding, than it is with social sciences as a thing. Qual stuff is much lower effort... And to be clear I think Qual has a place there, it just shouldn't be the only thing and it certainly shouldn't be masquerading as quant... But going all quant in social sciences could quickly become harmful if it isn't tempered with some qual/experiential studies. There needs to be a better balance imho.
  - Tarsul 2y ago
    Love your use of ~ in "~agree". Such a nice shortcut. Might steal that :D
- UweSchmidt 2y ago
  While we're bashing economics, something I truly miss is that no new high level economic systems are being discussed prominently. As important as fusion in physics or cancer treatment in medicine, we badly need to explore and discuss something beyond the heavily ideologized systems of capitalism, communism and feed this to politics to communicate these potential options to the voters. Say, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Georgism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Georgism, which is old and half forgotten. It appears as economics is kind of muted, students and professors beholden to an ideology themselves or feeling the need to appease potential employers who are usually politicized institutions with no room for intellectual curiosity. What else remains in terms of practical economics besides determining the inflation rate (oops, that one is also politicized)?
  - amelius 2y ago
    Yes economic system is highly flawed. Elon Musk owns $400B. Earth will become uninhabitable after 1 billion years from now (when the heat of the Sun becomes too large for us). This means that Musk, if he lived that long, would be able to spend $400 every day until the death of all life on Earth. This is 15 times the current average daily income worldwide. If this is not insane, then what is?
    - narrator 2y ago
      You're looking at the world as a poor person. If you had Elon's brilliance you'd probably quit after you made $5 million dollars or so and definitely after you sold Zip2 back in the 1990s and spent the rest of your life on the beach. The only reason he's still working as hard as he does is not because he wants to spend that on himself. He wants the glory of going to Mars and having a positive impact on humanity and that requires control of the activities of large companies like SpaceX, etc. which requires ownership stakes in those companies that are valued in the billions. One of the reasons that he campaigned so hard for Trump is that Kamala's proposed wealth taxes on unrealized capital gains were going to take his companies from him and he'd have to sell to Vanguard or Blackrock, who would give control of the companies to Boeing-tier mediocrity which would mean that we'd never get to Mars. There have been so many companies where the founders sold out and retired because they had enough money and they got bought by big conglomerates who destroyed those companies with mediocre management and neglect. This is the great thing about Elon, he just keeps building and leveraging all that money to create bigger and bigger companies using his creativity and management ability to achieve his goal of launching an era of space exploration.
- immibis 2y ago
  New Zealand has a conservative government since the most recent election. Economists help conservatives stay in power, while sociologists and so on help conservatives stay out of power. Conservatives are very quid pro quo. That's the difference. It has nothing to do with the content of the research.
- snakeyjake 2y ago
  ? Economics research is a series of cults who all predict different outcomes for the same series of inputs based on how the original founder of the cult, I mean school, felt about the king and his ability to tax the wealthy several centuries ago. There are several trillion social sciences more rigorous than economics. As far as I can tell economic researchers actively discourage experimentation because the results of an actual well-run valid experiment would ruin everyone's career.
felixgallo 2y ago
can you provide an example of a discipline that has taken a hard turn towards rejecting the scientific method?
- bbor 2y ago
  [flagged]
- easyThrowaway 2y ago
  This. Actually, I've observed the opposite way more often in EU academic circles: Humanistic studies parroting STEM quantitative approaches in fields where it's useless or even ridiculous - Think the "poetic mathematical analysis" at the beginning of Dead Poets Society.
- peatmoss 2y ago
  Geography, sociology, anthropology for starters. Take a read about postmodern epistemologies. See how many papers draw on "pure theory". I even saw this in my required coursework prior to dropping out of a PhD in urban planning.
  - greentxt 2y ago
    [flagged]
  - AlotOfReading 2y ago
    The parent post talks about "recent years". Postmodernism being in any way dominant hasn't been a thing (in American universities) since the late 80s or maybe early 90s. The common approach these days is theoretical pluralism.
  - felixgallo 2y ago
    can you point to a specific example of a geography program turning away from the scientific method? I've seen postmodernism and deconstructivism applied to architecture and rhetoric, but as convoluted and ultimately non-explanatory as I found them, they were still based in the formal ideas of cause and effect, and experimental approaches to theories.
zamfi 2y ago
Hmm. Are you familiar enough with research in economics, or the hard sciences, to say that all the work in those disciplines lack an emphasis on “generalizable findings”? It feels like epistemic weaksauce to claim that entire fields explicitly reject the goal of generalizable knowledge because they question or reject “the scientific method” on the basis of “I’ve read some case study / qualitative papers”.
- mistermann 2y ago
  The notion that rejecting the scientific method is necessarily bad thing is epistemically unsound, and a rather provocative topic.
  - peatmoss 2y ago
    And yet I did not state this, and it seems you're rounding my position to an easier one to dismiss. I don't reject non-scientific scholarship. But I see the focus in some disciplines a little like twinkies and soda: a bit of them can be fine and maybe even be good in some circumstances (brings joy; maybe as a recovery item for some diabetic conditions). But my feeling is that some of these disciplines have indexed a bit too much on twinkie and soda.
    - mistermann 2y ago
      I think we are very much on the same general page!
      - peatmoss 2y ago
        Ah, I think I misread the intent of what you wrote—apologies!
        mistermann 2y ago
        Not entirely I bet! I think of science in much the same way that you think of other disciplines.
ClumsyPilot 2y ago
> turn towards qualitative methods and epistemologies that are either misaligned with or explicitly reject the scientific method. At least you can see their questionable method upfront, and can disagree with it. Economics is worse: it has become completely quantitative, with sophisticated mathematics. I’ve heard the approach referred to as ‘physics envy’ It appears unapproachable to a non-expert and authoritative. But it’s not like physics It’s conclusions are often catastrophically wrong because all the mathematics relies on shaky qualitative assumptions: people are perfectly rational, etc. For example we have published economic research that forecasts that severe climate change will only damage global GDP by 1%. They conclude that farming productivity will be reduced by 25% and farming is 4% of global GDP, so it’s 1%. Then they model some effect on the consumer because food prices go up. It does not occur to the authors to model impact of physical result of that, which is, famine and political instability that comes with it.
- jt2190 2y ago
  Maybe I’m wired differently, but what you’re describing sounds like estimation, so I’d expect that they’ve made some underlying assumptions, foresight being imperfect and all. I’m unclear what you’re arguing for here, that we should not attempt to estimate because we have to make some assumptions about future events? Or is it that the estimators in this case should have used different assumptions? Or is it that they should also be estimating the potential for famines and political instability (which maybe they don’t feel qualified to do?)
  - MobiusHorizons 2y ago
    The assertion is that a 25% reduction in farming capacity should have a nonzero negative effect on non-farming gdp, due to people not being fed
    - jt2190 2y ago
      That assertion is due to the incorrect assumption that we can’t feed everyone on the planet if farming becomes less productive than it is today, and ignores that we currently produce very large food surpluses. > They conclude that farming productivity will be reduced by 25% and farming is 4% of global GDP, so it’s 1%. Then they model some effect on the consumer because food prices go up. > It does not occur to the authors to model impact of physical result of that, which is, famine and political instability that comes with it.
lazystar 2y ago
> I hate to see [a correction] happen as part of a charged ideological / political process. Isn't that any correction? changing the status quo is about as purely political as it gets
- ninth_ant 2y ago
  All changes to the status quo can have political repercussions. But there is a difference between a change that is a byproduct of someone trying to do what is right in a given situation vs a change that someone is making directly relating to external ideological processes. For this example, was the decision made by academics who analyzed the situation and felt that some aspects of study were underfunded? Or was it outsiders who entered the process with a specific objective and didn’t bother with the details so long as their ideological objectives were achieved? Both are “politics” but they aren’t the same.
VoodooJuJu 2y ago
The social sciences are not science and good riddance to them. They are religious rituals with only the trappings of the scientific method. These rituals are often purely performative, but the outcomes can be useful for effecting political goals, as the studies have historically given authoritative weight to bureaucrats and their designs. The ruse is failing though, and I think New Zealand's actions here could be evidence of this trend. No longer is "studies show..." a sufficient enough deception for enacting political ends. People are demanding sounder reasoning in politics than what Scientism has to offer. Most invocations of Scientism are directed at these social sciences, due to its egregiousness.
- immibis 2y ago
  Are you sure you haven't confused them with economics?
MiguelX413 2y ago
Economics is the worst social science, an economist is never considered wrong, only of a different “school of economics”. Economists speak as if they have authority and as if their field is objective, but at the same time have those “schools”. Is there such a thing as an unideological economist?
- orange_joe 2y ago
  I think your idea of economics is more informed by online debate than actual research. Contemporary economists mostly try to articulate things through econometrics, which is a fairly data driven field. It’s fair if you have issues with the rigor of these studies but a discussion of schools is fairly off base from my experience.
  - LargeWu 2y ago
    Correct. A graduate degree in economics is much closer to an applied math degree than something that resembles what we would traditionally consider social sciences.
    - lordnacho 2y ago
      To me it seemed like there were two kinds of economics degrees. One was a math degree pretending to be about the economy. At the graduate level, it could be a science: actually going out and measuring things with some pretty hardcore tools, and then publishing a theory that nobody who ought to use it (AKA politicians) would ever be able to understand. There's real findings here on stuff like the minimum wage, which you'd think someone would care about. It could also be just some extremely complicated derivations that pretended they were related to the real world, but with ridiculously mathematical assumptions. The other was a softie-softie "talk about how the world works" degree with barely any mathematics, just lots of readings and essays. You could choose what you wanted to do. This is why I've never quite figured out how to assess economics graduates. I don't know what they got up to. They also seem to do some very disparate kinds of work once they (I guess I should say "we") graduate.
fallingknife 2y ago
What incentive is there to fix it if funding isn't cut? And how else do you think funding can be cut that isn't a "charged ideological / political process"?
micromacrofoot 2y ago
tying all social science to economics, what's the worst that could happen
greentxt 2y ago
>I hate to see it happen as part of a charged ideological / political process. Can it happen another way?
confidantlake 2y ago
I suspect you are right that economics will survive cuts. Not that it is any more of a science but because it is basically a propaganda arm for the establishment. This is true whether that establishment is died in the wool Marxists or libertarian free market absolutists.
littlestymaar 2y ago
> Some disciplines in the social sciences in recent years have taken a pretty hard turn towards qualitative methods and epistemologies that are either misaligned with or explicitly reject the scientific method. Hard to see a social science field that fits this description better than economics though…
fsckboy 2y ago
>I think a correction is warranted, but I hate to see it happen as part of a charged ideological / political process. didn't the changes that you would like corrected happen as part of a charged ideological / political process?
Hilift 2y ago
This is public/state controlled funding. Also it is reserving it for "research with economic benefits." New Zealand isn't a rich country. Also private entities can fund research. It is common in the US for chemical companies to fund grants. For example, to determine what chemicals are in breast milk. https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2021/may/13/pfas-forever-chemicals-breast-milk-us-study https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2021/may/13/pfas-for... https://pubs.acs.org/doi/10.1021/acs.est.0c06978 https://pubs.acs.org/doi/10.1021/acs.est.0c06978 https://www.acs.org/about/aboutacs/financial/overview.html https://www.acs.org/about/aboutacs/financial/overview.html
- asdfman123 2y ago
  > New Zealand isn't a rich country It's 23rd by GDP per capita, next to France
  - bogantech 2y ago
    > per capita So France is over 10x richer then
    - immibis 2y ago
      France has to spread its 10x higher funding between 10x more scientists.
  - ztetranz 2y ago
    One of New Zealand's problems is that, yes it's a rich country compared to many others but it's conveniently close to a bigger richer country with easy immigration for NZ citizens. Record numbers of kiwis are moving to Australia where wages are higher and prices are usually lower. The "brain drain" is very real and quite concerning. I'm a kiwi living in the US so admittedly I'm not helping matters but I do worry about my home country being on a slippery slope.
- autoexec 2y ago
  > Also private entities can fund research. It is common in the US for chemical companies to fund grants. It's also common in the US for companies to fund research so that they can manipulate results to their benefit and/or to bury results showing that their products are harmful. One of the many nice things about publicly funded research is that its purpose isn't to increase sales/stock prices, advertise, or manipulate/hide the truth from the public.
KaiserPro 2y ago
> pretty hard turn towards qualitative methods How repeatable is the field of economics?
rayiner 2y ago
> In short, I think a correction is warranted, but I hate to see it happen as part of a charged ideological / political process. That’s a bad heuristic. When something is failing, that approach’s ideological proponents will continue to defend it, while the ideological opponents will call out the shortcomings. That’s just how everything works. You should evaluate whether or not the thing is working on its own merits, not based on who is leveling the criticism.

MichaelZuo 2y ago

Yeah even a sizable fraction of economic research is not credible enough to take at face value… let alone social sciences in general.

bb86754 2y ago

Agreed. But I don’t think economics is off the hook here either. To me it’s the social science that best masquerades as a “hard” science while still make huge jumps in logic that are rarely justified in the papers I’ve read.

peatmoss 2y ago
I studiously avoided making a normative statement that economics should take over this role. Any personal preferences I have here are separate from my beliefs about what I predict to happen. :-) I ~agree with you about the quality of econ papers. In some cases, I see the quantitative facility of econ papers as being better than similar studies executed by e.g. sociologists. But in some cases, flashy quant skills are used to distract from more fundamental issues. Assuming my prediction that social science research shifts to econ comes to pass, I think the natural pressure will be to drag econ's present quality bar downward.
- graemep 2y ago
  > But in some cases, flashy quant skills are used to distract from more fundamental issues. I agree, I sometimes thing economists like quantitive approaches because it makes them feel like "real scientists" and numbers have an air of credibility. It look a lot of arguing to let my MSc dissertation supervisor let me do one on financial theory (which I am good at) rather than econometrics (which i struggled with).
  - BehindBlueEyes 2y ago
    Worst offenders of liking quant approches to feel like real scientists may be when psychologists use formulas to describe their theory like they're a mathematician. All it does is making their theories obtuse, while no math actually happens... I think the problem is more with the institutions and incentives e.g. to publish a lot for funding, than it is with social sciences as a thing. Qual stuff is much lower effort... And to be clear I think Qual has a place there, it just shouldn't be the only thing and it certainly shouldn't be masquerading as quant... But going all quant in social sciences could quickly become harmful if it isn't tempered with some qual/experiential studies. There needs to be a better balance imho.
- Tarsul 2y ago
  Love your use of ~ in "~agree". Such a nice shortcut. Might steal that :D
UweSchmidt 2y ago
While we're bashing economics, something I truly miss is that no new high level economic systems are being discussed prominently. As important as fusion in physics or cancer treatment in medicine, we badly need to explore and discuss something beyond the heavily ideologized systems of capitalism, communism and feed this to politics to communicate these potential options to the voters. Say, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Georgism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Georgism, which is old and half forgotten. It appears as economics is kind of muted, students and professors beholden to an ideology themselves or feeling the need to appease potential employers who are usually politicized institutions with no room for intellectual curiosity. What else remains in terms of practical economics besides determining the inflation rate (oops, that one is also politicized)?
- amelius 2y ago
  Yes economic system is highly flawed. Elon Musk owns $400B. Earth will become uninhabitable after 1 billion years from now (when the heat of the Sun becomes too large for us). This means that Musk, if he lived that long, would be able to spend $400 every day until the death of all life on Earth. This is 15 times the current average daily income worldwide. If this is not insane, then what is?
  - narrator 2y ago
    You're looking at the world as a poor person. If you had Elon's brilliance you'd probably quit after you made $5 million dollars or so and definitely after you sold Zip2 back in the 1990s and spent the rest of your life on the beach. The only reason he's still working as hard as he does is not because he wants to spend that on himself. He wants the glory of going to Mars and having a positive impact on humanity and that requires control of the activities of large companies like SpaceX, etc. which requires ownership stakes in those companies that are valued in the billions. One of the reasons that he campaigned so hard for Trump is that Kamala's proposed wealth taxes on unrealized capital gains were going to take his companies from him and he'd have to sell to Vanguard or Blackrock, who would give control of the companies to Boeing-tier mediocrity which would mean that we'd never get to Mars. There have been so many companies where the founders sold out and retired because they had enough money and they got bought by big conglomerates who destroyed those companies with mediocre management and neglect. This is the great thing about Elon, he just keeps building and leveraging all that money to create bigger and bigger companies using his creativity and management ability to achieve his goal of launching an era of space exploration.
immibis 2y ago
New Zealand has a conservative government since the most recent election. Economists help conservatives stay in power, while sociologists and so on help conservatives stay out of power. Conservatives are very quid pro quo. That's the difference. It has nothing to do with the content of the research.
snakeyjake 2y ago
? Economics research is a series of cults who all predict different outcomes for the same series of inputs based on how the original founder of the cult, I mean school, felt about the king and his ability to tax the wealthy several centuries ago. There are several trillion social sciences more rigorous than economics. As far as I can tell economic researchers actively discourage experimentation because the results of an actual well-run valid experiment would ruin everyone's career.

felixgallo 2y ago

can you provide an example of a discipline that has taken a hard turn towards rejecting the scientific method?

bbor 2y ago
[flagged]
easyThrowaway 2y ago
This. Actually, I've observed the opposite way more often in EU academic circles: Humanistic studies parroting STEM quantitative approaches in fields where it's useless or even ridiculous - Think the "poetic mathematical analysis" at the beginning of Dead Poets Society.
peatmoss 2y ago
Geography, sociology, anthropology for starters. Take a read about postmodern epistemologies. See how many papers draw on "pure theory". I even saw this in my required coursework prior to dropping out of a PhD in urban planning.
- greentxt 2y ago
  [flagged]
- AlotOfReading 2y ago
  The parent post talks about "recent years". Postmodernism being in any way dominant hasn't been a thing (in American universities) since the late 80s or maybe early 90s. The common approach these days is theoretical pluralism.
- felixgallo 2y ago
  can you point to a specific example of a geography program turning away from the scientific method? I've seen postmodernism and deconstructivism applied to architecture and rhetoric, but as convoluted and ultimately non-explanatory as I found them, they were still based in the formal ideas of cause and effect, and experimental approaches to theories.

zamfi 2y ago

Hmm. Are you familiar enough with research in economics, or the hard sciences, to say that all the work in those disciplines lack an emphasis on “generalizable findings”? It feels like epistemic weaksauce to claim that entire fields explicitly reject the goal of generalizable knowledge because they question or reject “the scientific method” on the basis of “I’ve read some case study / qualitative papers”.

mistermann 2y ago
The notion that rejecting the scientific method is necessarily bad thing is epistemically unsound, and a rather provocative topic.
- peatmoss 2y ago
  And yet I did not state this, and it seems you're rounding my position to an easier one to dismiss. I don't reject non-scientific scholarship. But I see the focus in some disciplines a little like twinkies and soda: a bit of them can be fine and maybe even be good in some circumstances (brings joy; maybe as a recovery item for some diabetic conditions). But my feeling is that some of these disciplines have indexed a bit too much on twinkie and soda.
  - mistermann 2y ago
    I think we are very much on the same general page!
    - peatmoss 2y ago
      Ah, I think I misread the intent of what you wrote—apologies!
      - mistermann 2y ago
        Not entirely I bet! I think of science in much the same way that you think of other disciplines.

ClumsyPilot 2y ago

> turn towards qualitative methods and epistemologies that are either misaligned with or explicitly reject the scientific method. At least you can see their questionable method upfront, and can disagree with it. Economics is worse: it has become completely quantitative, with sophisticated mathematics. I’ve heard the approach referred to as ‘physics envy’ It appears unapproachable to a non-expert and authoritative. But it’s not like physics It’s conclusions are often catastrophically wrong because all the mathematics relies on shaky qualitative assumptions: people are perfectly rational, etc. For example we have published economic research that forecasts that severe climate change will only damage global GDP by 1%. They conclude that farming productivity will be reduced by 25% and farming is 4% of global GDP, so it’s 1%. Then they model some effect on the consumer because food prices go up. It does not occur to the authors to model impact of physical result of that, which is, famine and political instability that comes with it.

jt2190 2y ago
Maybe I’m wired differently, but what you’re describing sounds like estimation, so I’d expect that they’ve made some underlying assumptions, foresight being imperfect and all. I’m unclear what you’re arguing for here, that we should not attempt to estimate because we have to make some assumptions about future events? Or is it that the estimators in this case should have used different assumptions? Or is it that they should also be estimating the potential for famines and political instability (which maybe they don’t feel qualified to do?)
- MobiusHorizons 2y ago
  The assertion is that a 25% reduction in farming capacity should have a nonzero negative effect on non-farming gdp, due to people not being fed
  - jt2190 2y ago
    That assertion is due to the incorrect assumption that we can’t feed everyone on the planet if farming becomes less productive than it is today, and ignores that we currently produce very large food surpluses. > They conclude that farming productivity will be reduced by 25% and farming is 4% of global GDP, so it’s 1%. Then they model some effect on the consumer because food prices go up. > It does not occur to the authors to model impact of physical result of that, which is, famine and political instability that comes with it.

lazystar 2y ago

> I hate to see [a correction] happen as part of a charged ideological / political process. Isn't that any correction? changing the status quo is about as purely political as it gets

ninth_ant 2y ago
All changes to the status quo can have political repercussions. But there is a difference between a change that is a byproduct of someone trying to do what is right in a given situation vs a change that someone is making directly relating to external ideological processes. For this example, was the decision made by academics who analyzed the situation and felt that some aspects of study were underfunded? Or was it outsiders who entered the process with a specific objective and didn’t bother with the details so long as their ideological objectives were achieved? Both are “politics” but they aren’t the same.

VoodooJuJu 2y ago

The social sciences are not science and good riddance to them. They are religious rituals with only the trappings of the scientific method. These rituals are often purely performative, but the outcomes can be useful for effecting political goals, as the studies have historically given authoritative weight to bureaucrats and their designs. The ruse is failing though, and I think New Zealand's actions here could be evidence of this trend. No longer is "studies show..." a sufficient enough deception for enacting political ends. People are demanding sounder reasoning in politics than what Scientism has to offer. Most invocations of Scientism are directed at these social sciences, due to its egregiousness.

immibis 2y ago
Are you sure you haven't confused them with economics?

MiguelX413 2y ago

Economics is the worst social science, an economist is never considered wrong, only of a different “school of economics”. Economists speak as if they have authority and as if their field is objective, but at the same time have those “schools”. Is there such a thing as an unideological economist?

orange_joe 2y ago
I think your idea of economics is more informed by online debate than actual research. Contemporary economists mostly try to articulate things through econometrics, which is a fairly data driven field. It’s fair if you have issues with the rigor of these studies but a discussion of schools is fairly off base from my experience.
- LargeWu 2y ago
  Correct. A graduate degree in economics is much closer to an applied math degree than something that resembles what we would traditionally consider social sciences.
  - lordnacho 2y ago
    To me it seemed like there were two kinds of economics degrees. One was a math degree pretending to be about the economy. At the graduate level, it could be a science: actually going out and measuring things with some pretty hardcore tools, and then publishing a theory that nobody who ought to use it (AKA politicians) would ever be able to understand. There's real findings here on stuff like the minimum wage, which you'd think someone would care about. It could also be just some extremely complicated derivations that pretended they were related to the real world, but with ridiculously mathematical assumptions. The other was a softie-softie "talk about how the world works" degree with barely any mathematics, just lots of readings and essays. You could choose what you wanted to do. This is why I've never quite figured out how to assess economics graduates. I don't know what they got up to. They also seem to do some very disparate kinds of work once they (I guess I should say "we") graduate.

fallingknife 2y ago

What incentive is there to fix it if funding isn't cut? And how else do you think funding can be cut that isn't a "charged ideological / political process"?

micromacrofoot 2y ago

tying all social science to economics, what's the worst that could happen

greentxt 2y ago

>I hate to see it happen as part of a charged ideological / political process. Can it happen another way?

confidantlake 2y ago

I suspect you are right that economics will survive cuts. Not that it is any more of a science but because it is basically a propaganda arm for the establishment. This is true whether that establishment is died in the wool Marxists or libertarian free market absolutists.

littlestymaar 2y ago

> Some disciplines in the social sciences in recent years have taken a pretty hard turn towards qualitative methods and epistemologies that are either misaligned with or explicitly reject the scientific method. Hard to see a social science field that fits this description better than economics though…

fsckboy 2y ago

>I think a correction is warranted, but I hate to see it happen as part of a charged ideological / political process. didn't the changes that you would like corrected happen as part of a charged ideological / political process?

Hilift 2y ago

This is public/state controlled funding. Also it is reserving it for "research with economic benefits." New Zealand isn't a rich country. Also private entities can fund research. It is common in the US for chemical companies to fund grants. For example, to determine what chemicals are in breast milk. https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2021/may/13/pfas-forever-chemicals-breast-milk-us-study https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2021/may/13/pfas-for... https://pubs.acs.org/doi/10.1021/acs.est.0c06978 https://pubs.acs.org/doi/10.1021/acs.est.0c06978 https://www.acs.org/about/aboutacs/financial/overview.html https://www.acs.org/about/aboutacs/financial/overview.html

asdfman123 2y ago
> New Zealand isn't a rich country It's 23rd by GDP per capita, next to France
- bogantech 2y ago
  > per capita So France is over 10x richer then
  - immibis 2y ago
    France has to spread its 10x higher funding between 10x more scientists.
- ztetranz 2y ago
  One of New Zealand's problems is that, yes it's a rich country compared to many others but it's conveniently close to a bigger richer country with easy immigration for NZ citizens. Record numbers of kiwis are moving to Australia where wages are higher and prices are usually lower. The "brain drain" is very real and quite concerning. I'm a kiwi living in the US so admittedly I'm not helping matters but I do worry about my home country being on a slippery slope.
autoexec 2y ago
> Also private entities can fund research. It is common in the US for chemical companies to fund grants. It's also common in the US for companies to fund research so that they can manipulate results to their benefit and/or to bury results showing that their products are harmful. One of the many nice things about publicly funded research is that its purpose isn't to increase sales/stock prices, advertise, or manipulate/hide the truth from the public.

KaiserPro 2y ago

> pretty hard turn towards qualitative methods How repeatable is the field of economics?

rayiner 2y ago

> In short, I think a correction is warranted, but I hate to see it happen as part of a charged ideological / political process. That’s a bad heuristic. When something is failing, that approach’s ideological proponents will continue to defend it, while the ideological opponents will call out the shortcomings. That’s just how everything works. You should evaluate whether or not the thing is working on its own merits, not based on who is leveling the criticism.