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An entertaining thing about articles of the form "How n Economists Think About x" is just how confident most of them manage to sound when making statements that
by pjscott 14y ago
An entertaining thing about articles of the form "How n Economists Think About x" is just how confident most of them manage to sound when making statements that some of the others disagree with.
- frostmatthew 14y agoWhich I don't think is in the least bit limited to either economists or articles. Any of us could easily find five developers (or any other group of professionals) and we'd also observe "just how confident most of them manage to sound when making statements that some of the others disagree with"
- baddox 14y agoEconomics, like politics, is heavily based on axioms over which reasonable people disagree. The problem is that people value their axioms so intensely that they take them for granted and don't even share what those axioms are, let alone discuss them with people who hold opposing axioms.
- shardling 14y agoI've heard that within the discipline, this isn't really the case -- most academics understand there are a lot of issues very far from being settled. It's the outward facing economists, the ones who you actually hear from, that project a kind of false confidence in their models.