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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 autho

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.
    - xp84 2y ago
      > You could choose what you wanted to do. Interesting. Did students choose by selecting different institutions with different ideas of what should go into that degree, or is there very wide flexibility in course requirements?
      - lordnacho 2y ago
        Different courses at the same institution
- thefaux 2y ago
  My objection is to the idea that everything true and important can be captured in metrics and quantitatively modeled. Then there is the fact that even to the extent that things like macroeconomics can be modeled (which is never at a level of accuracy that would be accepted in any scientific discipline), it still often fails to capture the social/political dynamics of the moment such that the theory matches felt experience. I believe that economics has largely captured power in social science by essentially stealing scientific authority and falsely claiming it as their own. Then they dismiss other fields of social inquiry as soft and unworthy of equal status even though their own insights are often of lesser value than the supposedly soft social sciences.
  - peatmoss 2y ago
    I'm an acolyte in the church of bounded rationality and the fallibility of institutions that practice science. I studied journalism as an undergraduate, and my beliefs here are like in journalism. Objectivity is impossible, like a Platonic ideal. But, it's an excellent thing to strive for. "Fuck it, it's impossible" is the wrong answer in my opinion. Qualitative methods and pure theory scholarship have their place, but most useful qualitative research at least hints at some testable hypotheses. I feel that an underemphasis on generalizability is what happens when disciplines give up. And at worse, theory-based scholarship as it's applied in some social sciences is really no better than really obtusely worded political punditry.
    - klabb3 2y ago
      Exact numbers are easy to measure but not the only way to measure something. Data-driven is the new statistics but 10x worse because it has more sources of obfuscation, and bean counters (including super “smart” and analytically minded) obsess narrowly over models. Add ML/AI and you got an order of magnitude again. There’s an impedance mismatch where we have enormous amounts of useless data and a small amount of useful data. Best we can do is use and create more of the useful data instead of obsessing over P>.99 on something useless that will be misinterpreted anyway. The problem, in my view, isn’t qualitative per se, but rather unfalsifiability. Ideology is when the solution is always more of the same no matter what the outcome is. Communism/socialism and neoliberalism all fall in this category. I believe this holds true if you go more academic into Keynesianism and say Chicago school - models that have become truisms to their followers.
- MiguelX413 2y ago
  My idea of economics is based on people who are interviewed with “economist” written under their name when they're introduced on screen. Whether it be online or by mainstream news outlets, an economist that agreed with what the creator wants to convey is always easily found.
  - goatlover 2y ago
    But that's not the actual science, that's an economist giving opinions on a news show. You can find plenty of examples of physicists giving opinions on lots of things also. Go look on Sabine Hossenfelder's YT channel.
- consteval 2y ago
  Data driven analytics is more or less useless if you're ideologically driven. At the end of the day all of our economists are raging capitalists, so they will always approach any data gathered from a capitalist perspective. They will purposefully ignore any other possibilities because they are literally incapable of thinking about them. It's not something they've ever considered or digested. It's a lot like being car-brained. It's why very smart people keep proposing trains with extra steps but never calling them trains - they can't. Their minds lack the ability to view transportation outside of a car-centric perspective. Similarly, these economists lack the part of their brain where they can examine economics in a non-capitalist perspective. This is despite the fact that there are zero capitalist countries on Earth. In the US alone, 40% of our GDP comes from government spending. Shh, don't tell the economists!
- littlestymaar 2y ago
  I see this claim about how people have “a wrong idea of what economics truly is” all the time when someone criticizes economics, but it's a No True Scotsman fallacy. Economics really is like that, and no it's not being “data driven” it's publication-driven with tons of p-hacking in order to either: 1. fit the author's worldview (these people tend to become the famous ones), 2. or simply get one more paper published to survive the publish-or-perish rat race (the average Joe).
nonrandomstring 2y ago
The funny thing is that all who enter the realm of politics magically become instant expert "economists". The UK's Rachel Reeves was suddenly falling over herself to associate any scrap of experience she's had with "economics" [0]. All the actual scientists and hard business decision makers I know try to distance themselves from such jibber-jabber. [0] https://order-order.com/2024/10/24/rachel-reeves-bank-economist-myth-busted/ https://order-order.com/2024/10/24/rachel-reeves-bank-econom...
- mavhc 2y ago
  "she studied philosophy, politics and economics at the University of Oxford, where she was an undergraduate student at New College, achieving a 2:1 Bachelor of Arts degree in June 2000.[8] From 2003 to 2004 she studied for a master's degree in economics at the London School of Economics."
narrator 2y ago
Paul Romer of the New York Stern School of Business has talked about the crisis of identifiability[1] which makes most macroeconomics non-falsifiable and completely isolates economists from ever being wrong in their theories. He's likened this to the crisis with string theory in physics. [1] https://paulromer.net/the-trouble-with-macro/WP-Trouble.pdf https://paulromer.net/the-trouble-with-macro/WP-Trouble.pdf
AlanYx 2y ago
One of the stronger criticisms of Economics as a discipline is that double-blind reviewing of papers is uncommon, and there has been a trend in the past 25 years for the subset of Econ journals that did use double-blind reviewing to move away from it. Not being an economist, I was surprised to learn this. There are reasons for it, e.g., the prevalence of working papers in the field, but it promotes insularity of ideas and creates an uneven playing field for less well-known and connected researchers.
confidantlake 2y ago
It makes no sense if you treat it as a science. It makes perfect sense if you treat it as a pr department for whichever government or group is funding it. Whether you are a 1890s industrialist or a 1920s Marxist there is an economist for you.
axus 2y ago
It's certainly worthy of study. The whole ecosystem of a "science" might be bad at one point in time, and all the practitioners might be wrong, but one day in the future the field could "get it right"!
throw0101d 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? Economics is falsifiable. For example, a bunch of folks made a prediction ("currency debasement and inflation") when the US Federal reserve started QE: > We believe the Federal Reserve’s large-scale asset purchase plan (so-called “quantitative easing”) should be reconsidered and discontinued. We do not believe such a plan is necessary or advisable under current circumstances. The planned asset purchases risk currency debasement and inflation, and we do not think they will achieve the Fed’s objective of promoting employment. * https://www.hoover.org/research/open-letter-ben-bernanke https://www.hoover.org/research/open-letter-ben-bernanke A bunch of other folks (e.g., Keynesians like Krugman) made a bunch of prediction as well. One group turned out right, another did not. Another experiment where one group predicted tax cuts would spur growth: * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kansas_experiment https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kansas_experiment Others predicted it would not, and were right. There was also sorts of folks talking that cutting government spending would spur growth, i.e., "expansionary austerity": * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Expansionary_fiscal_contraction https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Expansionary_fiscal_contractio... Others predicted it would not, and turned out correct: * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Austerity:_The_History_of_a_Dangerous_Idea https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Austerity:_The_History_of_a_Da... Amsterdam ended up running a bit of an 'experiment' on what happens when you tried banning houses owned by investors: * https://frw.studenttheses.ub.rug.nl/3913/1/Master%20Thesis%20final%20version%20Pieter%20Reitsma%2017-7-2022.pdf https://frw.studenttheses.ub.rug.nl/3913/1/Master%20Thesis%2... * https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=4480261 https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=4480261 * Via: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BRqZBuu_Ers https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BRqZBuu_Ers There are "schools" that put forward various models that get it right more than wrong. The fact that some people ignore things for ideological purposes is not the fault of the field in general, or of those that actually try to get their models to match reality. In fact a lot of the time people know that what they're putting forward is wrong: > Ronald Reagan launched his 1980 campaign for the presidency on a platform advocating for supply-side economics. During the 1980 Republican Party presidential primaries, George H. W. Bush had derided Reagan's economic approach as "voodoo economics".[23][24] Following Reagan's election, the "trickle-down" reached wide circulation with the publication of "The Education of David Stockman" a December 1981 interview of Reagan's incoming Office of Management and Budget director David Stockman, in the magazine Atlantic Monthly. In the interview, Stockman expressed doubts about supply side economics, telling journalist William Greider that the Kemp–Roth Tax Cut was a way to rebrand a tax cut for the top income bracket to make it easier to pass into law.[25] Stockman said that "It's kind of hard to sell 'trickle down,' so the supply-side formula was the only way to get a tax policy that was really 'trickle down.' Supply-side is 'trickle-down' theory."[25][26][27] * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trickle-down_economics#Reagan_years https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trickle-down_economics#Reagan_... * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Supply-side_economics https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Supply-side_economics

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.
  - xp84 2y ago
    > You could choose what you wanted to do. Interesting. Did students choose by selecting different institutions with different ideas of what should go into that degree, or is there very wide flexibility in course requirements?
    - lordnacho 2y ago
      Different courses at the same institution
thefaux 2y ago
My objection is to the idea that everything true and important can be captured in metrics and quantitatively modeled. Then there is the fact that even to the extent that things like macroeconomics can be modeled (which is never at a level of accuracy that would be accepted in any scientific discipline), it still often fails to capture the social/political dynamics of the moment such that the theory matches felt experience. I believe that economics has largely captured power in social science by essentially stealing scientific authority and falsely claiming it as their own. Then they dismiss other fields of social inquiry as soft and unworthy of equal status even though their own insights are often of lesser value than the supposedly soft social sciences.
- peatmoss 2y ago
  I'm an acolyte in the church of bounded rationality and the fallibility of institutions that practice science. I studied journalism as an undergraduate, and my beliefs here are like in journalism. Objectivity is impossible, like a Platonic ideal. But, it's an excellent thing to strive for. "Fuck it, it's impossible" is the wrong answer in my opinion. Qualitative methods and pure theory scholarship have their place, but most useful qualitative research at least hints at some testable hypotheses. I feel that an underemphasis on generalizability is what happens when disciplines give up. And at worse, theory-based scholarship as it's applied in some social sciences is really no better than really obtusely worded political punditry.
  - klabb3 2y ago
    Exact numbers are easy to measure but not the only way to measure something. Data-driven is the new statistics but 10x worse because it has more sources of obfuscation, and bean counters (including super “smart” and analytically minded) obsess narrowly over models. Add ML/AI and you got an order of magnitude again. There’s an impedance mismatch where we have enormous amounts of useless data and a small amount of useful data. Best we can do is use and create more of the useful data instead of obsessing over P>.99 on something useless that will be misinterpreted anyway. The problem, in my view, isn’t qualitative per se, but rather unfalsifiability. Ideology is when the solution is always more of the same no matter what the outcome is. Communism/socialism and neoliberalism all fall in this category. I believe this holds true if you go more academic into Keynesianism and say Chicago school - models that have become truisms to their followers.
MiguelX413 2y ago
My idea of economics is based on people who are interviewed with “economist” written under their name when they're introduced on screen. Whether it be online or by mainstream news outlets, an economist that agreed with what the creator wants to convey is always easily found.
- goatlover 2y ago
  But that's not the actual science, that's an economist giving opinions on a news show. You can find plenty of examples of physicists giving opinions on lots of things also. Go look on Sabine Hossenfelder's YT channel.
consteval 2y ago
Data driven analytics is more or less useless if you're ideologically driven. At the end of the day all of our economists are raging capitalists, so they will always approach any data gathered from a capitalist perspective. They will purposefully ignore any other possibilities because they are literally incapable of thinking about them. It's not something they've ever considered or digested. It's a lot like being car-brained. It's why very smart people keep proposing trains with extra steps but never calling them trains - they can't. Their minds lack the ability to view transportation outside of a car-centric perspective. Similarly, these economists lack the part of their brain where they can examine economics in a non-capitalist perspective. This is despite the fact that there are zero capitalist countries on Earth. In the US alone, 40% of our GDP comes from government spending. Shh, don't tell the economists!
littlestymaar 2y ago
I see this claim about how people have “a wrong idea of what economics truly is” all the time when someone criticizes economics, but it's a No True Scotsman fallacy. Economics really is like that, and no it's not being “data driven” it's publication-driven with tons of p-hacking in order to either: 1. fit the author's worldview (these people tend to become the famous ones), 2. or simply get one more paper published to survive the publish-or-perish rat race (the average Joe).

nonrandomstring 2y ago

The funny thing is that all who enter the realm of politics magically become instant expert "economists". The UK's Rachel Reeves was suddenly falling over herself to associate any scrap of experience she's had with "economics" [0]. All the actual scientists and hard business decision makers I know try to distance themselves from such jibber-jabber. [0] https://order-order.com/2024/10/24/rachel-reeves-bank-economist-myth-busted/ https://order-order.com/2024/10/24/rachel-reeves-bank-econom...

mavhc 2y ago
"she studied philosophy, politics and economics at the University of Oxford, where she was an undergraduate student at New College, achieving a 2:1 Bachelor of Arts degree in June 2000.[8] From 2003 to 2004 she studied for a master's degree in economics at the London School of Economics."

narrator 2y ago

Paul Romer of the New York Stern School of Business has talked about the crisis of identifiability[1] which makes most macroeconomics non-falsifiable and completely isolates economists from ever being wrong in their theories. He's likened this to the crisis with string theory in physics. [1] https://paulromer.net/the-trouble-with-macro/WP-Trouble.pdf https://paulromer.net/the-trouble-with-macro/WP-Trouble.pdf

AlanYx 2y ago

One of the stronger criticisms of Economics as a discipline is that double-blind reviewing of papers is uncommon, and there has been a trend in the past 25 years for the subset of Econ journals that did use double-blind reviewing to move away from it. Not being an economist, I was surprised to learn this. There are reasons for it, e.g., the prevalence of working papers in the field, but it promotes insularity of ideas and creates an uneven playing field for less well-known and connected researchers.

confidantlake 2y ago

It makes no sense if you treat it as a science. It makes perfect sense if you treat it as a pr department for whichever government or group is funding it. Whether you are a 1890s industrialist or a 1920s Marxist there is an economist for you.

axus 2y ago

It's certainly worthy of study. The whole ecosystem of a "science" might be bad at one point in time, and all the practitioners might be wrong, but one day in the future the field could "get it right"!

throw0101d 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? Economics is falsifiable. For example, a bunch of folks made a prediction ("currency debasement and inflation") when the US Federal reserve started QE: > We believe the Federal Reserve’s large-scale asset purchase plan (so-called “quantitative easing”) should be reconsidered and discontinued. We do not believe such a plan is necessary or advisable under current circumstances. The planned asset purchases risk currency debasement and inflation, and we do not think they will achieve the Fed’s objective of promoting employment. * https://www.hoover.org/research/open-letter-ben-bernanke https://www.hoover.org/research/open-letter-ben-bernanke A bunch of other folks (e.g., Keynesians like Krugman) made a bunch of prediction as well. One group turned out right, another did not. Another experiment where one group predicted tax cuts would spur growth: * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kansas_experiment https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kansas_experiment Others predicted it would not, and were right. There was also sorts of folks talking that cutting government spending would spur growth, i.e., "expansionary austerity": * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Expansionary_fiscal_contraction https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Expansionary_fiscal_contractio... Others predicted it would not, and turned out correct: * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Austerity:_The_History_of_a_Dangerous_Idea https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Austerity:_The_History_of_a_Da... Amsterdam ended up running a bit of an 'experiment' on what happens when you tried banning houses owned by investors: * https://frw.studenttheses.ub.rug.nl/3913/1/Master%20Thesis%20final%20version%20Pieter%20Reitsma%2017-7-2022.pdf https://frw.studenttheses.ub.rug.nl/3913/1/Master%20Thesis%2... * https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=4480261 https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=4480261 * Via: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BRqZBuu_Ers https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BRqZBuu_Ers There are "schools" that put forward various models that get it right more than wrong. The fact that some people ignore things for ideological purposes is not the fault of the field in general, or of those that actually try to get their models to match reality. In fact a lot of the time people know that what they're putting forward is wrong: > Ronald Reagan launched his 1980 campaign for the presidency on a platform advocating for supply-side economics. During the 1980 Republican Party presidential primaries, George H. W. Bush had derided Reagan's economic approach as "voodoo economics".[23][24] Following Reagan's election, the "trickle-down" reached wide circulation with the publication of "The Education of David Stockman" a December 1981 interview of Reagan's incoming Office of Management and Budget director David Stockman, in the magazine Atlantic Monthly. In the interview, Stockman expressed doubts about supply side economics, telling journalist William Greider that the Kemp–Roth Tax Cut was a way to rebrand a tax cut for the top income bracket to make it easier to pass into law.[25] Stockman said that "It's kind of hard to sell 'trickle down,' so the supply-side formula was the only way to get a tax policy that was really 'trickle down.' Supply-side is 'trickle-down' theory."[25][26][27] * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trickle-down_economics#Reagan_years https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trickle-down_economics#Reagan_... * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Supply-side_economics https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Supply-side_economics