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99% of the time it’s just astrology for men.
Economists’ math is as good as anyone else’.
The main problem is that economies are incredibly chaotic systems and all the math that humans can actually read described them poorly.
Any “scientific” field that produces Art Laffer is a fraud.
Dude isn’t even a low point in econ. People like him are the reason econ exists.
In real life the tax return shows you the best math, or you are fucked.
Economics is the math of political science.
By dubbing econ “dismal science” adherents exaggerate;
The “dismal”'s fine - it’s “science” where they patently prevaricate.
No. Economics is the child of math, not a sibling. It’s only half math. The other parent is philosophy/creative writing. That’s how you end up with the myth of barter and trickle-down, the stuff based on speculative storytelling, that refuse to listen to math.
I actually would like economics more if I didn’t have dyscalculia.
Economics is the offspring of math fucking psychology.
Don’t blame psychology, in this analogy the whole ordeal was rape. Plenty of economist still try to pass as psychology science a bunch of bullshit that was debunked half a century ago or is straight up pseudoscience from charlatans.
Economics is just applied statistics with a little sociology mixed in
Economics is just fascist sociology.
maybe pay attention to more than chicago
And simplified until linear relationships appear.
To be fair, my engineering degree also did this.
Good thing I learnt that linearity in my chosen specialty only breaks down in the exotic circumstances of air, room temperature, 1 atm pressure, and distances of <0,5 m or >30 m.
In college - Assume everything is linear
Later - Everything is not linear
Tell us you dont understand economics without telling us…
Supply demand curves are usually drawn with straight lines.
never once in my economics education did they do that. not just because it’s easier to draw a curve than a straight line, but because the shape of the curve defines the type of good. maybe your economics education was just… bad?
Type economics supply and demand curve into Google images for more data points than your personal experience.
ooo, everyday people (not economists) can put bad images up on the internet
This is from an encyclopedia. Here’s another
Did your economics training teach you to ignore data?
well i seemingly have a very different viewpoint, because the most interesting economics bits are econometrics, essentially data science - the same things all other stem folks use to find the underlying distribution, estimators, their significance, finding the p value. Using this to model whole world is just as wrong as saying all of chem is solved by taking mendelev periodic table. sourely it works, and explains some stuff, but just knowing it does not predict all of chemistry. same way, for example ls-lm model (suppply demand curve) does not explain the whole world, and good economists do not claim they can explain it (sorry for using bad examples, 1 only took 2-3 eco courses).
I’m so tired of this flack that economics gets, that it is somehow “lesser” because it is a “soft science.”
Economics does run randomised control trials. Economics does adhere to testable hypotheses. Economics does use rigorous statistics/maths.
You how sometimes grants/government programs are randomly allocated? Those are live, randomised control trials, and if you read the fine print you’ll find a project number for researchers studying the effects of rental subsidies, health insurance, etc, one of which being the Oregon Health Insurance Experiment. Those cancerous recommender algorithms, which are the culmination of millions of live A/B tests? Developed by the Econ PhDs poached by Big tech.
Oregon Medicaid health experiment - Wikipedia - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oregon_Medicaid_health_experiment
It is true that many hypotheses cannot have experiments run. But this makes it even more impressive when economists find natural experiments. For example, the 2021 Nobel Laureates Card, Angrist, and Imbens studied the effects of minimum wage by looking at the towns on the border of New Jersey/New York, which had implemented different minimum wages. They found that increasing minimum wage did not increase unemployment, completely contrary to ahem conservative wisdom.
The Prize in Economic Sciences 2021 - Popular science background - NobelPrize.org - https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/economic-sciences/2021/popular-information/
In contrast, many of the supposed “hard” sciences cannot run experiments either, or also adhere to untestable simplifying assumptions. Ecology, physics, geology (just to name a few) all study systems which are too large and complex to run experiments, yet the general public does not perceive them as “soft”.
The difference is that economics is unfortunately one of those fields where lots of unqualified people (read politicians) have lots of strong opinions about, and in turn has a disproportionate influence on everyone. Those criticised austerity measures in the wake of the GFC? That was due to politicians implementing the policies of the infamous “Growth in a Time of Debt” by Reinhart-Rogoff paper, which was published as a “proceeding” and hence not peer reviewed. During the peer review process was found to contain numerous errors including incorrect excel formulas. It didn’t matter - policymakers liked the conclusion, and rushed its implementation anyway.
Growth in a Time of Debt - Wikipedia - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Growth_in_a_Time_of_Debt
If you look into any awful policy, you will see a similar pattern. Even Milton Friedman, as an ultra hard libertarian for advocated for lowering taxes and abolishing all government benefit programs, recognised that poor people need some assistance, and so actually advocated for replacing benefits with a universal negative income tax (an even more extreme version of UBI). It didn’t matter - policymakers of the Reagan Thatcher era heard the lowering taxes and cutting welfare part, and didn’t do the UBI.
it’s 90% lobbying and propaganda, 10% math
Economics does run randomised Control trials. Economics does adhere to testable hypotheses. Economics does use rigorous statistics/maths.
Psychology too mate. Both use the scientific method, but the premise that all experiments are under full control doesn’t apply to them.
It’s a field full of grifters that get lifted up because they tell rich people what they want to hear.
The Chicago School is the driving force behind the rise of neoliberalism, the movement right of Western democracies, and the return of fascism in America.
Yes, there’s good work done in the field. But economists could prove definitively that capitalism is killing us all and that socialism is the only solution to organizing civilisation, and the only economists being platformed would continue to be neoliberal shit heels.
True if your too much of a flunky there’s still the Austrian School
Oh don’t get me started on the I’m afraid of math Austrian school
Its to economics what flat earth is to physics
I commend your appreciation of the field as a science, but you should also acknowledge that 80% of what’s currently taught in the academia about economics is just wrong. Supply and demand (unfalsifiable and shitty predictive capabilities compared to the falsifiable and empirically proven labour theory of value) is just one example in the long list of econ-101 bullshit.
Regardless, as an appreciator of economics, have you checked out econophysics? The study of economics as a thermodynamical system. It’s wonderful, with predictive capabilities on for example salary distributions in capitalist economies, Paul Cockshott has a book and a few introductory videos on his YouTube channel
No need to convince me of Econ 101 BS, economists themselves are well aware of it since at least the 1980s. That’s why basically every unit of Econ above the 101 level shits on it, and any good Econ 101 shits on itself.
As a general rule of thumb, anything in economics before 1970 basically ran on vibes due to lack of data. Unfortunately, current day undergrad Econ 101 lags at least 20 years behind the current consensus.
That’s why the Card, Angrist, and Imbens paper was such a big deal. They used (natural) experimental data, and found out that using Econ 101 supply and demand to study the labour market doesn’t work. That’s why there’s an entire field called labour economics, which is only taught at the graduate level.
Most policymakers probably only learnt Econ 101 maybe 4 decades ago, so they’re impression of Econ is probably six decades out of date.
The Death of “Econ 101” - https://www.currentaffairs.org/news/2022/10/the-death-of-econ-101
Funnily enough labour economics was taught as an elective at my undergrad in Utrecht University. This whole post makes me mad considering the amount of work it was getting through that bachelor’s, and especially so when you consider they literally had data science integrated as one of the optional minors… Which I took.
These people don’t have the slightest clue about economics beyond what
they’re taughtthey manage to learn in highschool, and therefore forecast that pitiful amount of knowledge to an entire empirical field… Probably to make themselves feel better. Human discount model in motion.
So the moderator of science memes does not know a single thing about modern economics and its empirical methodology. What a joke.
wins a Nobel
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