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Like supposedly scientists are split on Evolution, Global Warming and the Age of the Earth? I am a bit unfair, but economists agree on a lot of things like fre

• JDDunn9 13y ago
  Scientists are not split on those issues. Uneducated people disagree with the scientists. Big difference. If economists have a handle on things, why did the IMF have to apologize to Greece for giving them bad advice? Why did the Black-Scholes Model fail?
  • saosebastiao 13y ago
    You mischaracterize the disagreement. Scientists disagreeing with each other is not the same kind as anti science derps claiming that global warming is a conspiracy. Climate scientists, for example, can agree that the planet is warming, but they can't agree on whether it is warming at a 12C/century rate or a 1C/century rate. Most estimates fall somewhere in between, but the range of disagreement is HUGE in terms of impact and policy response. And he is right...economists agree on plenty of policy matters. That they disagree on some of the major problems of our time is not a problem witn the field. Disagreement on major problems is a tautology.
  • dimitar 13y ago
    Well, I'm not claiming that everything is just fine - the opposite of complete disarray. My point is that economics so burdened with controversy that its better to dismiss it.
• altoz 13y ago
  Austrian economists will beg to differ. The problem with those studies is that it's cherry-picking economists. Who cares about concensus? The measuring stick should be how correctly they can predict future events.
  • jbooth 13y ago
    Yeah, but Austrian economists are a tiny minority, and were much tinier before January 2009. The political/media system gives them 50% weight, not the success, or lack thereof, of their ideas.
  • _delirium 13y ago
    I wouldn't say Austrians as a whole disagree, though some of them certainly do. If you look at F.A. Hayek's expressed positions, he agrees with a reasonable number of those listed as consensus above. Yes to free trade, yes to public healthcare, yes to taxing pollution (rather than regulating it), no to price floors/ceilings, etc. Monetary policy and how to manage the business cycle are some of the points of strong disagreement, though.
• jessriedel 13y ago
  I think the author's point is that economists are split on one of the most important issues. In that sense, it's not unlike physicists being split on the relative value of string theory. The only difference is that the economic issue is politically charged, so the tribal forces unsure the split endures. For physics, there are strong bandwagon incentives for everyone to do the same thing, so you swing from a huge multi-decade investment in an untested theory, to a complete vanishing of strings jobs. In both cases, it's not the fact that something is unknown that's the problem. It's that smart people can't come to a Bayesian agreement, so it's a flag that people are being massively irrational.
  • jamesaguilar 13y ago
    I wouldn't call string theory an issue of major importance with respect to physics compared to monetary policy in economics. I'm not a physics buff, but my understanding is string theory hasn't yet made any predictions that would result in different outcomes than the standard model. On the other hand, the variety of monetary policy viewpoints among economists would certainly make different predictions, and their magnitude would be significant. More analogous would be if physicists were split on whether gravity exists.
    • jessriedel 13y ago
      No, gravity is something for which there is overwhelming, unambiguous evidence. Macroeconomics is something that by its very nature is difficult to gather convincing evidence about. (No controlled experiments, very small observational data set.) Strings is much more like a macroeconomic question, because neither can be definitively tested. How to formulate a quantum theory of gravity is the most important outstanding question in fundamental physics. Strings is the best guess. Policy-wise, the effects of government spending is the most important outstanding question in economics. I think it's pretty analogous actually.
      • RockyMcNuts 13y ago
        except economists aren't actually split on the effects of government spending in general, just on the relative importance of those effects in specific situations. Wikipedia's collection of unsolved problems in economics - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_unsolved_problems_in_economics http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_unsolved_problems_in_ec...
• deleted 13y ago
  [deleted]
• dfc 13y ago
  "broad pool of economists from Ivies" What are Ivies? At first I thought you meant Ivy League but more than half of the experts polled are not from Ivy League schools. (Chicago, MIT, Berkeley, Stanford)
• kaoD 13y ago
  Oh, sample size is 40! And it's only US economists. And only economists in academia. That poll is not biased at all and represents the point of view of all economists in the world! I'm sure the 40 economists will Strongly Agree on this with a high confidence.
• RockyMcNuts 13y ago
  Exactly - there is broad consensus, and the controversy is manufactured. Anybody remember Bush's tax rebate? http://usatoday30.usatoday.com/money/perfi/taxes/2008-04-25-tax-rebate-checks_N.htm http://usatoday30.usatoday.com/money/perfi/taxes/2008-04-25-... Or all the times Republicans talk about how we can't cut defense spending because of the jobs that would be lost? http://www.theatlanticwire.com/politics/2012/05/military-spending-cuts-looming-republican-rediscover-keynesianism/52808/ http://www.theatlanticwire.com/politics/2012/05/military-spe... When push comes to shove, they're all Keynesians, anything to the contrary is just populistic rhetoric or opportunistic bashing of things they don't approve of. Pretty much everyone agrees spending boosts GDP in the short run, they may disagree about the size of the fiscal multiplier, what government should spend on, how big it should be, whether it will cause inflation, how much unemployment is structural, what the non-accelerating inflation rate of unemployment is, etc. http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2012-07-23/the-u-s-economic-policy-debate-is-a-sham.html http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2012-07-23/the-u-s-economic-po...
  • tsotha 13y ago
    >When push comes to shove, they're all Keynesians... But that has nothing to do with economics. That's because they want to spend money, same as the Democrats. There's precious little reason to believe anything good has come from monetary policy in recent years.
    • RockyMcNuts 13y ago
      There are no atheists in foxholes, and there are no conservatives when the pork is being passed out. But regardless, everybody believes spending raises GDP. But one side is afraid it will work too well, and will have undesirable side effects for their constituencies, and finds bashing on the grounds it doesn't work has populist appeal.
      • tsotha 13y ago
        >There are no atheists in foxholes, and there are no conservatives when the pork is being passed out. Well, no conservative politicians. Conservative voters aren't happy about it, but we consider it better than the alternative. >But regardless, everybody believes spending raises GDP. Well, sure, spending raises GDP in the short run. Because GDP includes that spending. I can raise my personal GDP this month by running up my credit cards, too, but that's not necessarily a good thing. The "broad consensus" for Keynesianism is political in nature, not economic. The linked article is correct - you know what an economist is going to find before he starts looking based purely on his politics, and since the academy is far to the left you find lots of support for government solutions to whatever ails the economy.
• ChuckMcM 13y ago
  This is so true, the key takeaway is that you can hire a scientist to 'prove your agenda' with science, you can hire an economist to 'prove your monetary policy' with economics, and you can hire a mathematician to 'prove your trend/point' with statistics. And once demagogues figured out that having a [profession] type person on board improved the reception of their rhetoric they went off to find such people. So what is the chance we could create some sort of Guild of Objectivity or some such. Basically membership in the guild for person of profession X requires that all of their output as a professional person be complete and without omission or slant. The proof of said objectivity to be created by review of at least 3 other Guild members of the same profession. Where the Guild removes members who violate their oath, and operates on constant self evaluation. Not going to happen of course, but it would an interesting plot point in a fantasy story I suspect.
  • waps 13y ago
    About creating your guild : it's very simple. We return to the situation in the Roman empire, or the middle ages : politicians should no longer listen to scientists at all, so there is nothing to be gained by having scientific analysis turn out one way or the other. Ideally not just politicians, but everybody. Then your club would get back to normal. The problem is that these scientific analyses carry a lot of weight, and affect monetary outcomes of individuals and organisations by influencing the government. I would say the big victim of this thinking is not so much the science that goes one way or the other, but rather scientific theories that point out that it's impossible to know certain things. A lot of important sciences exhibit chaotic behavior, like economics, biology, medicine, even climate. This means there are stringent limits to how much we will ever know about them, and that it is perfectly explainable why statistics will (to varying degrees) suddenly fail to work on numbers from those sciences. But while you can get a lot of money, researchers and positions for investigating why something is true, or why something is false, it's almost impossible to get resources when you claim that humanity as a whole can never make progress on investigating some phenomenon because there's some mathematical rule preventing that. Even in cases where it's effectively an undisputed fact that the central limit theorem doesn't apply, people refuse to accept that things like average do not have a well-defined meaning for things like stock prices, or economic indicators. This seems to have become a central axiom of modern thinking, that science predicts everything. Even when people know the various basic principles preventing that, like Godel's theorems, or the basic axioms of statistics, they will deny the obvious consequences. Even if we do find the famous theory of everything, we are hardly done. Mathematics leaves a lot of real situations "undecided", and of course reality doesn't leave anything undecided. And even people knowing that you absolutely need the central limit theorem for any statistical rule to apply, refuse to give up their numbers when you demonstrate that it does not apply to their dataset. In most cases, that's easy : you demonstrate that at least one reasonable approximation for their data is a divergent series. At that point you've proven statistics doesn't apply to the dataset. It's easy to do this for lots of data, like stocks (because bad news amplifies, and can kill companies if the amplifier can be > 1, which is easy to find in the dataset), and it's easy to do that once you're outside of a trivially small range, the values of, say, solar irradiance are divergent, which means that whatever the statistical average is up to now, contains exactly zero information. You may as well roll the dice. The confusing thing is that it "generally" works in the short term, which is to say it's a huge effect that has lots of mass and needs time to move around, so it looks like a trend, but it isn't. It's a sudden change taking effect. Like when you have an approaching storm, the variance in any specific location looks like a smooth change, a trend, that lasts days or weeks, but it isn't. It's just the effect of a binary event that is the storm passing through, there is no trend. We have collectively decided as a species that science answers every question definitively. Even if science itself proves that to be false.