No joke: Economists do kind of fulfill the role of priests in that they explain the "necessary [fake] world order" to the masses.
Saying "Capitalism is a bad system" gets you comparable comments from economists as "Gods don't exist" gets you from priests in a religious society. Both comments also get cops on your ass as well (depending on where you live).
Because economist and even business leaders don't actually have any control over the economy. They try to predict it and make changes, but they have no real power as was shown by COVID and the Ukraine war.
They also have to justify how keeping at least 3-5% of people unemployed is a good thing for their economy god. That one and that inflation and growth are required to keep an economy going when we all know that there could be sustainable level existence if the investor class didn’t exist.
As someone that tries to be a bit of a generalist. Neoclassical economics is the one field of study where I have less respect for the field the more I learn about it and the problems that it tries to tackle.
Don't all scientific fields rest on fundamental assumptions? I mean, just to pull an example at random, astronomers were hung up on the geocentric model of the universe for a long time before we came up with the heliocentric model, which in turn was ditched for the "no true frame of reference" model we now use. Having flawed assumptions doesn't make it non-scientific, just incorrect.
What makes a difference is how models are evaluated in light of new evidence. If a model makes predictions that turn out to be incorrect, then a big part of scientific progress is in re-examining the underlying assumptions of the model.
My beef with economics isn't that it's often wrong, but that economists are often keen to present themselves as scientists to boost their epistemic authority, whilst also acting in a deeply unscientific way.
The worst economists for this get very offended if you say that economics is a soft science, with more in common with psychology than physics. This offends them because they hear "soft science" as a pejorative. Economics absolutely is a science, but the more that economists try to pretend that their object of study isn't wibbly wobbly as hell, the less I respect them.
Yeah, I think I'd agree with that. Although it's gotten large enough that it doesn't feel like a subset of sociology anymore, it still feels descended from sociology. (To give an example of what I mean by being large enough it's now distinct from sociology, biochemistry sprang forth from biology/biomedicine, but now is its own distinct field, with methods and modes of inquiry that are distinct from biology/biomedicine)
I mean, yeah. We don't have a unified theory of quantum gravity because at least one of our assumptions is off. Science is just figuring out precisely which assumptions are wrong and how wrong they are.
And yet the global economy is still operating on the same basic assumptions...
They've been made even worse by further developments of those basic assumptions as expounded by neoliberalism and reaganomics, but the underlying premises are still the same.
The global economy is definitely not being run by economists or anything particularly close to prescribed economic principles. Most countries are being run by some combination of authoritarian and/or populist governments whose economic policy is crafted to benefit either a small ruling class, or to win elections (voted on largely by people who don’t understand economics).
The most obvious example of this is the United States, which is the single largest national economy, and which keeps instituting tariffs despite “tariffs = almost always bad” being one of the first and most foundational tenets of macro econ.
The global economy is being run by capitalist oligarchs, whose central premises for existing are based on classical economic theories (private ownership of capital, extraction of resources, and exploitation of labor), their operational strategies are based on classical economic theories (infinite pursuit of growth at all costs, externalizing risks while internalizing profits, quarterly profit margins being the sole indicator of growth, cutting costs to minimize expenses and manufacturing scarcity to maximize pricing, etc.), and the policies meant to regulate and/or stimulate economic activity are based on classical economic theories (austerity for the poor, supply-side "trickle-down" economics for the rich including tax breaks, subsidies, and bailouts).
The tariffs are an exception attributable to the overt buffoonery of an extortionist grifter running the show. It doesn't negate all the other examples of how classical economic theory is destroying society and the planet.
It's definitely just Maths with feelings sprinkled on top.
If you read a book by any investor they'll talk about the irrationality of the market. They'll say how daytrading should be mathematically impossible, but admit how some people do profit a lot from it.
I wouldn't call it pseudoscience, because it's like mixing maths with psychology.
Economics is a funny one as ultimately it's a focused & technical strand of anthropology (which I believe is considered a science by many) that people often incorrectly lump in with maths.
Kinda tough for an academic to run meaningful experiments on an actual economy though beyond models and simulation. And as anyone who has watched a Gary Stevenson video or two will know, your average academic economist is pretty bad at models and simulations.
Though I guess even bad experiments are still experiments
Gary Stevenson is also an overconfident blow hard who thinks because he made money on the stock market he knows more than everyone. I'm a psychologist not an economist, I don't like economics, but this is all still wildly off base from what actually happens in academia. Economist don't run randomized control trial (RCT) style experiments. They use completely different techniques with different statistical methods to test assumptions. Are these as high quality for causal reasoning as a RCT study? No absolutely not. However I think the average person would be shocked at how much of every field of science does not confirm their studies to that gold standard and how difficult it is to match that exact specific scenario statistically.
Yes, we do run RCTs. There are entire branches of economics that can be entirely controlled for, double-blind and randomized. For example microeconomic theory and game theory.
Natural experiments are used all the time in many fields, especially the social sciences, for ethicality. That doesn't make them less valuable, as they test for things you would have never gotten to test for through RCTs, and don't serve as a "crutch" due to the lack of RCTs. They serve different purposes.
And that's just one aspect people get wrong, economics isn't all about straight lines like another (vehemently wrong) commenter was saying. It's also not about politics, even though the economics of politics are taught conceptually. At least in my European university, no one forced ideology with the study of the median voter theorem or Vickrey auctions, among many other topics.
Anyway, rant over. This whole post is a rage-bait and people engaging in it are either ignorant of the subject matter (totally fine if you're willing to learn and accept you're wrong) or simply rage-baiters themselves.
My apologies, I didn't mean to imply you never run RCTs, mostly that it's rarer that other disciplines and most of what lay people know of your science comes from non RCT work. I'll have to take a peak at that paper you linked as it looks interesting.
Your point on natural experiments is on point as they are dreams come true for many social scientists (thought sadly not always pleasant ones in recent times).
I also have to agree this post is pure rage bait. People dunk on social sciences all the time but would have their brains melt trying to learn Structural Equation Modeling and the concept of the Latent variable. My arguments with economists usually comes from my place as an IO psychologist who argues about labour and labour markets not if your science is real. It's sad how many will look st economics as useless in the same breadth they venerate figures like Marx. People need more education not less.
Of course it is! We’re just animals, after all. Is documenting the behavior of different species of beetles a science? The only difference is that we can replicate behavior through culture, not just genes.
This is an interesting perspective. I feel like I disagree with you, but I don't know why. Whenever I feel like this, it usually means that there is some interesting learning ahead of me if I am willing to chew on some ideas for a while, so thanks for writing this comment
I think a mainstream way of seeing things is that there's rational agents and non-rational agents, and they behave differently.
I.e. a lot of economy discusses how a rational agent would behave. But economic schools also recognize that not every human is a rational agent, and that's what advertisement is for. Basically, advertisement is a way to part fools and their money, i.e. give the money to more rational people instead. This is also partially justified with the philosophy that the world would become a better place if all the money (and therefore power) was in the hand of rational people.
all the money (and therefore power) was in the hand of rationalrich people.
This is the real point of econ. It's all about justifying inequalities.
Under their ideology the rational become rich and thus the most rich must be the most rational. And don't we want the world to be run by the most rational? Or do you want want those poor, gross, irrational agents?
It's an overt grift indicative of the deep rot in capitalist ideology.
economics is definitely closer to law studies than to theology. i mean, look at all the ownership relations and having to know what is proportional, how to run a business, rules and regulations, and such.
fun fact: theology was a respectable thing in the medieval ages. it was closer to maths/logic and spoke about how to organize a society and run a state. There were lots of influential people who studied maths but were also theologists, and lots of people studied theology and became mathematicians. I mean check out Isaac Newton who revolutionized physics with his maths-approach but also studied theology heavily. Check out Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz who revolutionized mathematics but studied philosophy/theology. There's a lot of overlap.
Theology, back then, was basically a mixture of logic/mathematics/how to organize a society/politics/and some metaphysics and philosophy. It was not a "make up random stuff" thing at all.
All of that changed in the modern age when theology became a cringe-worthy niche with basically no real content. Idk how exactly that happened. In the medieval days, however, it was one of the big three studies: theology (math), law (and economics), medicine.
Another way I often frame my perspective on this is:
Economics is the social control mechanism that filled the void vacated by religion after the Enlightenment.
Mythology was replaced with finance.
… Churches with banks.
… Clergy with economists.
… God with GDP.
I don’t see either as inherently problematic systems, but their lack of rigorous foundational attachment to reality informs my argument that they should be applied as subservient tools, as opposed to their current role as dominant, dictatorial weapons.
Yeah theology is "given these base assumptions and this text, interpret the will and nature of the divine." I can respect a person who studied theology at a respected university in all the ways I can't respect someone who studied preaching at a Bible college. That said I hold a weird amount of opinions on Christian theology for a pagan
Finance is an arbitrary subset of mathematics applied to money
Kinda nitpicky but finance is applied math or engineering. Finance people haven't done much in terms of actual math. There's no money in math (literally and figuratively).
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?
Don't forget the other sibling: IT. Theoretical Computer Science is basically a form of mathematics, with all its algorithms and data structures that you can study and do proofs about.
like, i know some people insist music is math, but in my opinion that music is always lacking emotion. i prefer my music more on the side of folk song: not much math but a lot of passion in it.
I like both. Classical and prog rock both famously have a lot of math in them and I love them as genres. But also I kinda want a banjo to belt out some Seeger
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
Funnily enough labour economics was taught as an elective at my undergrad in my european uni. 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 taught they 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.
Sort of. They won't say that 2+2=5. The errors are in the isomorphism they claim and the empirical assumptions they make.
Two of my favorites:
Almost all of economics assumes normal distributions. We have good reason to believe that almost no economic variables are normally distributed. That means we routinely underestimate tail risk. We do it anyway because that's the only way we can get the math to work.
Almost all of modern economics assumes utility functions with transitive preferences. Testing shows that even the economists who published those theories don't have transit preferences.
There's plenty of "actual" economists like that, and unfortunately some of them are among the generally most listened to, they lead prominent institutes and advise my home country's government.
If they make those assumptions, they are not economists, they are politicians. Learning to distinguish the difference is the same skillset boomers need to pick up on in relation to real images and AI generation... Clearly you lack in that department.
It’s usually taught horribly and used poorly, with a large helping of superstition and rituals.
If you actually get to use it in a context where you’re not pulling some predecided methods out of a black box of tools chosen by people who don’t know statistics but want to avoid their publisher asking questions, it’s pretty fun.
I hated how statistics was taught in my university science course. I did a ton of extra advanced modules when I was doing my A levels before university, so I learned more stats than most people do in high school. This just made the poor statistics taught to biochemists all the more confusing. There were things that they taught that were straight up wrong, and it really made me doubt myself.
I ended up going away and learning statistics in a more thorough way, which ended up being a lot of fun. In a weird way, I'm glad for how grim the stats course was because it led me to a much deeper understanding than I'd have gotten otherwise
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).
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.
I've tried explaining this to people, and they just don't get it. They say philosophy is just some pointless, meaningless, armchair activity. I tell them, "All fields of study are a subdiscipline of philosophy" and they call me a misinformed idiot.
Like, dude, whatever you study, the field itself wouldn't exist if it wasn't first developed by philosophers upon a philosophical foundation that was in turn developed by generations of philosophers.
The history of philosophy is the history of human ideas and of humanity itself. All of the sciences, both hard and soft, are simply highly specialized fields of philosophy.
Something that I often end up ranting about when I've had a few drinks at the pub is how I wish that all science education included some philosophy. I don't mean as a brief, one off unit, but actually woven throughout.
I actually got really into learning about the philosophy of science because I found this insufficiency became apparent when learning about machine learning systems in the context of bioinformatics and protein structure prediction. There were some absolutely brain-dead takes in papers that seemed to believe that big data methods have the potential of basically removing scientists from the process of science. Fortunately, there were also papers that called this out as nonsense, because expert knowledge is more important than ever in building and using machine learning systems.
Shout out to Sabine Leonelli, author of Data-Centric Biology: A Philosophical Study, which was the book I read that looked at this in detail. Her work is what really cemented my passion for the philosophy of science, and got me into philosophy more generally.
Yup, if someone is simply applying the scientific method without truly understanding its theoretical underpinnings, what are they really doing?
It's like driving a car with no mechanical knowledge. Not impossible, but if something goes wrong with the internal structures of it then you won't be able to figure out the problem and fix it on your own without seeking the help of someone who understands it.
And to be honest, I've seen a lot of dogmatic assertions from self-proclaimed atheists who view themselves as scientifically-minded while having no understanding of the philosophy of science.
Empiricism is great for what it's good for, but it's limited to observable phenomena. And without rationalism, it's like having a bunch of pieces of a puzzle and being unable to fit them together.
Here's a fact, here's another fact, and here's a third fact, but whether we realize it or not, we can't construct those facts into a coherent argument which leads to an accurate conclusion without utilizing rational processes. It's like focusing on factual soundness without paying any mind to logical validity.
And I see so many scientists making logical leaps that are quite simply invalid or fallacious. The most common one I see is "There's not enough evidence to support this hypothesis, therefore it must be untrue." It commits the fallacy of negating the antecedent.
If there's sufficient evidence, then the hypothesis must be true.
There is not sufficient evidence.
Therefore, the hypothesis isn't true.
It does not follow that the hypothesis isn't true.
I've seen this xkcd expanded with philosophy way off to the right saying something like "hey, what are all of you talking about over there?" since philosophy was the first asking "how?" or "why?" and all the others came later as more directed persuits of those individual questions. Philosophy first and foremost teaches logic and rhetoric, through which all sciences rely on.
Kinda, but that one's a different edit referencing it coming full circle with philosophy on both sides. The specific edit I'm referring to just has philosophy wayyyyyyy off to the right, doesn't have sociology saying that(which I've never heard before and doesn't make sense) and doesn't have the logicians addition either.
While I get your point and don't necessarily disagree, I do think it's important to give philosophy a little more credit. Philosophy was what eventually came up with the idea of proving your claims and providing evidence to back that up. Logic and the scientific method were the creations of philosophy. Math was originally a philosophy/religion/cult(the Cult of Pythagoras for one example)devoted to numbers and believing them to be the ultimate answer to the universes questions.
Philosophy is a soft science, sure, but it's core teachings are fundamental for everything else.
The question I always tend to have, when the subject of if economics is or isn't a science comes up is: given that economies and trade are clearly things that exist (to the extent that any sort of human social interaction exists anyway), and that have measurable properties, it at least ought to be theoretically possible to analyze their behavior using the techniques of science. If you don't think economics is a science, then if you were to use science to study those things, what field would you consider that work to belong to?
Economics is scientific. Someone could argue that many aspects of neoclassical economics specifically are not scientific, but the study of economic phenomena would remain a scientific endeavor nonetheless.
I believe economics should be a field of magical studies, which should be a field of psychology. Magical studies should also study the placebo effect, memetics, religious studies, somatopsychic and psychosomatic phenomena, faith exercise science, servitorology, parogenetics, and spellcrafting.
Magic is just science without the burden of coherent theories that predict reliable experimental outcomes, which covers a lot more than psychology. I'd say it's more like humanity spitballing science-ish ideas and seeing which ones pan out, than any one branch of science specifically.
No, magic is observable phenomena caused by things that aren't real, where "real"ness is a social construct. Thus, magical studies is a field exploring the engineering of social constructs.
I'm not sure what realness has to do with it. Magic tends to have some kind of theoretical framework to explain observable phenomena (god(s), the planets, "energies", etc.) the same way scientific theories do, they even have some experimental frameworks (e.g. my church growing up had a cadre of old ladies who were touted as "good at praying" because they apparently had a good track record with the man upstairs. To my knowledge these claims were never validated in a properly controlled laboratory environment against a random sample of similar parishioners. They also happened to be voracious gossips who wielded private information as a weapon, which is a funny coincidence.) The phenomena that magic explains are "real" insofar as they are experiences that humans have, but the underpinning theories are often unfalsifiable and/or contradictory ("prayer works" and "god's plan is unknowable and perfect, eternal and unchanging"). That's what I mean about coherent theories and predictable results. I guess you could say that theories that make accurate predictions are "more real" but I don't think it makes sense to think about the realness of a scientific theory. It's either proven false or not proven false so far.
Well, the whole point of magic and what makes it different from regular technology is that it straddles the border between consensus reality and the socially unreal. Otherwise, why wouldn't it just be called technology?
I would love to perform a replication study of this treatment, but I believe we first need to develop a stronger field of faith exercise science. I believe the patient's strength of faith is a significant variable in these kinds of treatments, and thus we need a reliable faith measurement system so that we can control for faith. Otherwise our results will appear random and unreliable.
So here is My plan to verify the reproducibility of magical disease treatments:
Use an experimental design to find whether intentional training of faith can strengthen the placebo effect.
Develop a reliable measurement scale of faith, perhaps using the placebo effect as a measure.
Reproduce My treatment with a sample of central sleep apnea patients, with the patients' faith strength as a quasi-experimental independent variable, kept double-blind from patients and clinicians until after treatment. Hypothesis: the treatment will work better for patients with stronger faith.
Develop reliable exercises for strengthening faith, so that everyone can benefit from magic.
I think magic does get called technology, once we construct a sufficiently rigorous way to test its predictions and those predictions are validated. The first thing that comes to mind is the old folk remedy of using willow bark to treat fever. I don't know if that specific treatment was ever described as "magic" per se, but for a broad swath of human history it was a rule: if fever, then willow bark. It was also used in a bunch of other remedies that didn't work, and there were (still are) a ton of folk remedies for fever that either didn't work or actively worsened the situation, but the combination of willow bark and fevers was eventually validated, salicin was identified as the active agent, and it became a technological commodity. Some magics, like homeopathy, have been scientifically _in_validated, and therefore get relegated to outside the domain of scientific inquiry. Some, like phrenology, gain broad acceptance within a scientific establishment before they are convincingly invalidated and discarded. Some, like astrology, are broadly scientifically rejected but still have a broad lay appeal for non-scientific reasons.
I think the testing of any magical effect is the same as the testing of anything non-magical. The Chaos Magick Servitor sounds like a useful mental model for "learning a new thing". If it is proven an effective therapy in clinical trials for apnea, is it no longer magic? I just don't find the question of whether it's magic an interesting one in that case. I still want to understand the underlying mechanisms, possibly by conducting trials on which skills can be taught via the "Chaos Magick Servitor" method vs. a control, call it the "Mundane Learning of a Brain Technique" method. You could control for faith by surveying participants before sorting them into groups and blinding testers until the test is complete. If faith in Chaos Magick, or the Servitor technique, is predictive of being able to control apnea via that method, I would expect strong believers in the "Chaos Magick Servitor" method to get better results than their non-believing cohorts, and relatively little difference between believers and non-believers in the control group. One potential downside is that I don't really know of a good method for measuring "faith" other than self-reporting, but I think if the participant pool is large enough you could probably still get some convincing results as long as you're content to measure effectiveness vs "self-reported faith" rather than "actual faith". I don't know that there's a reliable way to know someone's innermost heart so that might be the best you can do with our current technology.
In addition to surveying for current faith strength, you could poll for faith-adjacent wants or beliefs, e.g. "In general, do you want your faith in Chaos Magick to be stronger, weaker, or stay the same?" This would give you an additional dimension that could let you test multiple hypotheses at once: instead of just having high faith and low faith, you could have six groups: high-aspirational, high-avoidant, high-content, low-aspirational, low-avoidant, and low-content. If these groups show significant variation in how well they use the Chaos Magick Servitor method, that could illuminate how one's current faith and their belief about what their faith "should" be affect the treatment, and how those two factors interact. I'd also be curious to see if there would be any differences among the different faith groups in the control group. It could well be that low faith individuals show no benefit, or that they show more improvement with a more scientific sounding presentation of the same concept.
I think "Faith based technology" is a fine working definition of magic for most practical uses. Many people say if something requires faith to work, it's magic and not science. But I believe we can use science on faith the same as we can use science on anything else.
Capitalist economics only work if society has faith in the money issuing authority (e.g. the US federal reserve). Money is a faith based technology and therefore magic. So I think economics should be a field of magical theory. Magicians seem more qualified to answer economic questions than mathematicians. When we let mathematicians do economics, they start making up nonsense like perfectly free markets, because they're not used to human fallibility. Magicians are perfectly aware of human fallibility, and that's why we should be in charge of the science of economics. We know capitalism is a scam, just like horoscopes or three card monte.
I think that economics is a science, but contrary to the insistence of many economists I have known, it is absolutely a soft science. This is not a pejorative (though I reluctantly admit that I used to view it as such). My view is that economists would be wise to learn from their fellow social scientists in other fields. That would do a lot to help improve the rigour of economics.
You raise an interesting point, but there's more to science than just measuring stuff. Most of my beef with economics comes from how economists react when their model's predictions don't align with reality. If a physicist's theory makes incorrect predictions, then there's not really much wiggle room to explain away the problem. If a psychologist's theory makes predictions that aren't correct, then my impression is that "explaining away" errors by gesturing at additional complexities not able to be accounted for is a much more acceptable thing to happen. This isn't necessarily bad, but rather seems to be a part of how knowledge production happens in the social sciences.
I can't comment too much on the specifics, as I am very much not a social scientist. Like I said above though, I have come around from looking down on these fields. In fact, I've come to appreciate them precisely because the skills used in the soft sciences are so alien to me. Economics uses a heckton of quantitative methods, but the phenomena they study are fundamentally social in nature, and thus they reduce the utility of their work by trying to distance themselves from the social sciences
A different comment makes a compelling argument for it being an anthropology. If anthropology is "just" psychology of a culture, then economics is a specific offshoot of that, one focusing primarily on trade systems/money use.
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.
Math is for useless things like solving Diophantine equations or playing with primes. I will not have math slandered by associating it with applications.
Economics is the fakest science ever. It's just perpetuating the capitalist scheme. Don't waste your time learning it. It'll all be irrelevant in the end anyways.
Economics is basically social psychology with some numbers sprinkled in.
Don't forget gambling.
... And wishful thinking!
So..... religion
No joke: Economists do kind of fulfill the role of priests in that they explain the "necessary [fake] world order" to the masses.
Saying "Capitalism is a bad system" gets you comparable comments from economists as "Gods don't exist" gets you from priests in a religious society. Both comments also get cops on your ass as well (depending on where you live).
Because economist and even business leaders don't actually have any control over the economy. They try to predict it and make changes, but they have no real power as was shown by COVID and the Ukraine war.
No, surely all will be good if we invest in so-called "AI", war and the distopian surveillance state. /s
They also have to justify how keeping at least 3-5% of people unemployed is a good thing for their economy god. That one and that inflation and growth are required to keep an economy going when we all know that there could be sustainable level existence if the investor class didn’t exist.
They don't even disguise it, praxeology is effectively theology without the metaphysics.
I struggle to consider it scientific because it bakes in so many fundamental assumptions without questioning them. At least mainstream economics.
Ah, uh, it's a xkcd. Expanded by a reddit user, forever ago.
Philosophy is in entirely the wrong place for some reason. Should be slightly to the right of maths.
For this reason it seems closer to religion for me
As someone that tries to be a bit of a generalist. Neoclassical economics is the one field of study where I have less respect for the field the more I learn about it and the problems that it tries to tackle.
Don't all scientific fields rest on fundamental assumptions? I mean, just to pull an example at random, astronomers were hung up on the geocentric model of the universe for a long time before we came up with the heliocentric model, which in turn was ditched for the "no true frame of reference" model we now use. Having flawed assumptions doesn't make it non-scientific, just incorrect.
What makes a difference is how models are evaluated in light of new evidence. If a model makes predictions that turn out to be incorrect, then a big part of scientific progress is in re-examining the underlying assumptions of the model.
My beef with economics isn't that it's often wrong, but that economists are often keen to present themselves as scientists to boost their epistemic authority, whilst also acting in a deeply unscientific way.
The worst economists for this get very offended if you say that economics is a soft science, with more in common with psychology than physics. This offends them because they hear "soft science" as a pejorative. Economics absolutely is a science, but the more that economists try to pretend that their object of study isn't wibbly wobbly as hell, the less I respect them.
I'd consider economics a subgenre of sociology.
Yeah, I think I'd agree with that. Although it's gotten large enough that it doesn't feel like a subset of sociology anymore, it still feels descended from sociology. (To give an example of what I mean by being large enough it's now distinct from sociology, biochemistry sprang forth from biology/biomedicine, but now is its own distinct field, with methods and modes of inquiry that are distinct from biology/biomedicine)
If making unproven assumptions is problematic then physics is in some real deep shit.
I mean, yeah. We don't have a unified theory of quantum gravity because at least one of our assumptions is off. Science is just figuring out precisely which assumptions are wrong and how wrong they are.
I keep calling it a pseudoscience.
Someone told me that I "don't know what a pseudoscience is" and that I was "using the word wrong."
No. No, I know what it is, and I used it precisely the way I meant it.
Wayyy too many people think classic economic theory is a legitimate field...
To be fair, that's like 150 years old, back when they believed in spontaneous generation, and the idea that continents move was absurd and crazy.
And yet the global economy is still operating on the same basic assumptions...
They've been made even worse by further developments of those basic assumptions as expounded by neoliberalism and reaganomics, but the underlying premises are still the same.
The global economy is definitely not being run by economists or anything particularly close to prescribed economic principles. Most countries are being run by some combination of authoritarian and/or populist governments whose economic policy is crafted to benefit either a small ruling class, or to win elections (voted on largely by people who don’t understand economics).
The most obvious example of this is the United States, which is the single largest national economy, and which keeps instituting tariffs despite “tariffs = almost always bad” being one of the first and most foundational tenets of macro econ.
The global economy is being run by capitalist oligarchs, whose central premises for existing are based on classical economic theories (private ownership of capital, extraction of resources, and exploitation of labor), their operational strategies are based on classical economic theories (infinite pursuit of growth at all costs, externalizing risks while internalizing profits, quarterly profit margins being the sole indicator of growth, cutting costs to minimize expenses and manufacturing scarcity to maximize pricing, etc.), and the policies meant to regulate and/or stimulate economic activity are based on classical economic theories (austerity for the poor, supply-side "trickle-down" economics for the rich including tax breaks, subsidies, and bailouts).
The tariffs are an exception attributable to the overt buffoonery of an extortionist grifter running the show. It doesn't negate all the other examples of how classical economic theory is destroying society and the planet.
Yep somehow the indoctrination system hasn't improved in the past 200 years. It's not just economics either.
It's definitely just Maths with feelings sprinkled on top.
If you read a book by any investor they'll talk about the irrationality of the market. They'll say how daytrading should be mathematically impossible, but admit how some people do profit a lot from it.
I wouldn't call it pseudoscience, because it's like mixing maths with psychology.
It's a soft science at best, but some people try to treat it like it's a hard science.
I still hold that it displays characteristics of pseudoscience by operating on unsound premises and unverifiable assumptions though
true! maybe with some biology, anthropology, network effects, game theory churned in
Fake numbers with fake relationships between them.
Economics is a funny one as ultimately it's a focused & technical strand of anthropology (which I believe is considered a science by many) that people often incorrectly lump in with maths.
Kinda tough for an academic to run meaningful experiments on an actual economy though beyond models and simulation. And as anyone who has watched a Gary Stevenson video or two will know, your average academic economist is pretty bad at models and simulations.
Though I guess even bad experiments are still experiments
Edit: typo
Most of them are pretty bad at anthro too tbh lol
If they were good at stuff they wouldn't be economists
Source: I'm an economist
Gary Stevenson is also an overconfident blow hard who thinks because he made money on the stock market he knows more than everyone. I'm a psychologist not an economist, I don't like economics, but this is all still wildly off base from what actually happens in academia. Economist don't run randomized control trial (RCT) style experiments. They use completely different techniques with different statistical methods to test assumptions. Are these as high quality for causal reasoning as a RCT study? No absolutely not. However I think the average person would be shocked at how much of every field of science does not confirm their studies to that gold standard and how difficult it is to match that exact specific scenario statistically.
Yes, we do run RCTs. There are entire branches of economics that can be entirely controlled for, double-blind and randomized. For example microeconomic theory and game theory.
Yes, there are fields that get unethical to experiment under as you scale things up (think macroeconomics), which is why we have famous papers like The Colonial Origins of Comparative Development: An Empirical Investigation - AJR.
Natural experiments are used all the time in many fields, especially the social sciences, for ethicality. That doesn't make them less valuable, as they test for things you would have never gotten to test for through RCTs, and don't serve as a "crutch" due to the lack of RCTs. They serve different purposes.
And that's just one aspect people get wrong, economics isn't all about straight lines like another (vehemently wrong) commenter was saying. It's also not about politics, even though the economics of politics are taught conceptually. At least in my European university, no one forced ideology with the study of the median voter theorem or Vickrey auctions, among many other topics.
Anyway, rant over. This whole post is a rage-bait and people engaging in it are either ignorant of the subject matter (totally fine if you're willing to learn and accept you're wrong) or simply rage-baiters themselves.
My apologies, I didn't mean to imply you never run RCTs, mostly that it's rarer that other disciplines and most of what lay people know of your science comes from non RCT work. I'll have to take a peak at that paper you linked as it looks interesting.
Your point on natural experiments is on point as they are dreams come true for many social scientists (thought sadly not always pleasant ones in recent times).
I also have to agree this post is pure rage bait. People dunk on social sciences all the time but would have their brains melt trying to learn Structural Equation Modeling and the concept of the Latent variable. My arguments with economists usually comes from my place as an IO psychologist who argues about labour and labour markets not if your science is real. It's sad how many will look st economics as useless in the same breadth they venerate figures like Marx. People need more education not less.
...
Anthropology, as in what cultural arts are like in different groups of humanity? How is that a science? I even wanted to go into this field
Of course it is! We’re just animals, after all. Is documenting the behavior of different species of beetles a science? The only difference is that we can replicate behavior through culture, not just genes.
This is an interesting perspective. I feel like I disagree with you, but I don't know why. Whenever I feel like this, it usually means that there is some interesting learning ahead of me if I am willing to chew on some ideas for a while, so thanks for writing this comment
The actual foundation of economics.
Economics brings the spherical cow issue to its logical extreme with “efficient markets”
If markets are driven by “rational actors” then why is advertising a trillion dollar industry?
They're just contributing to perfect information, or, uh...
I think a mainstream way of seeing things is that there's rational agents and non-rational agents, and they behave differently.
I.e. a lot of economy discusses how a rational agent would behave. But economic schools also recognize that not every human is a rational agent, and that's what advertisement is for. Basically, advertisement is a way to part fools and their money, i.e. give the money to more rational people instead. This is also partially justified with the philosophy that the world would become a better place if all the money (and therefore power) was in the hand of rational people.
This is the real point of econ. It's all about justifying inequalities.
Under their ideology the rational become rich and thus the most rich must be the most rational. And don't we want the world to be run by the most rational? Or do you want want those poor, gross, irrational agents?
It's an overt grift indicative of the deep rot in capitalist ideology.
Economics, as an intellectual discipline, is closer to theology than physics. Its power is proportional to the belief it commands.
Finance is an arbitrary subset of mathematics, cherry picked to retroactively support a given economic model, and applied as its supporting mythology.
It’s entirely imaginary, which means alternatives are only ever a conjuring away.
economics is definitely closer to law studies than to theology. i mean, look at all the ownership relations and having to know what is proportional, how to run a business, rules and regulations, and such.
fun fact: theology was a respectable thing in the medieval ages. it was closer to maths/logic and spoke about how to organize a society and run a state. There were lots of influential people who studied maths but were also theologists, and lots of people studied theology and became mathematicians. I mean check out Isaac Newton who revolutionized physics with his maths-approach but also studied theology heavily. Check out Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz who revolutionized mathematics but studied philosophy/theology. There's a lot of overlap.
Theology, back then, was basically a mixture of logic/mathematics/how to organize a society/politics/and some metaphysics and philosophy. It was not a "make up random stuff" thing at all.
All of that changed in the modern age when theology became a cringe-worthy niche with basically no real content. Idk how exactly that happened. In the medieval days, however, it was one of the big three studies: theology (math), law (and economics), medicine.
Another way I often frame my perspective on this is:
Economics is the social control mechanism that filled the void vacated by religion after the Enlightenment.
Mythology was replaced with finance.
… Churches with banks.
… Clergy with economists.
… God with GDP.
I don’t see either as inherently problematic systems, but their lack of rigorous foundational attachment to reality informs my argument that they should be applied as subservient tools, as opposed to their current role as dominant, dictatorial weapons.
Yeah theology is "given these base assumptions and this text, interpret the will and nature of the divine." I can respect a person who studied theology at a respected university in all the ways I can't respect someone who studied preaching at a Bible college. That said I hold a weird amount of opinions on Christian theology for a pagan
it is closer to lobbying and propaganda than theology.
A distinction without a difference. Lobbying and propaganda are basically the prophesizing and scripture of politics.
not going to mansplain my perceived difference between the two, but I think we agree on the jist of it
Kinda nitpicky but finance is applied math or engineering. Finance people haven't done much in terms of actual math. There's no money in math (literally and figuratively).
The opposite. Its power is inversely proportional to the belief it commands.
The efficient market hypothesis only works if people don't believe it.
Economics is just applied statistics with a little sociology mixed in
And simplified until linear relationships appear.
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?
Economics is just fascist sociology.
maybe pay attention to more than chicago
Economics:
Let's turn this
Into this!
That's capitalism. There are other forms of economics.
Yeah but capitalist economics is all that they teach in the indoctrination system... Unless maybe you pay for it later in college.
And TBH the scientific credentials are pretty trash either way.
Don't forget the other sibling: IT. Theoretical Computer Science is basically a form of mathematics, with all its algorithms and data structures that you can study and do proofs about.
Save some potato salad for cousin Music!
Music is entirely math though. Just arranged all pretty like.
like, i know some people insist music is math, but in my opinion that music is always lacking emotion. i prefer my music more on the side of folk song: not much math but a lot of passion in it.
I like both. Classical and prog rock both famously have a lot of math in them and I love them as genres. But also I kinda want a banjo to belt out some Seeger
Writing a png file by hand currently and ngl this feels like 90% law school (or whatever these "rules" fall under) and 10% math.
I like the variations
Agriculture is only 12,000 years old. I suspect there are many more possible levels.
Laugh while you can, number boy.
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 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
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 my european uni. 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.it's 90% lobbying and propaganda, 10% math
Psychology too mate. Both use the scientific method, but the premise that all experiments are under full control doesn't apply to them.
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.
The main problem is that the math they do is often based on assumptions that have repeatedly been disproven but are still treated like gospel.
If you assume 2+2=5 you can follow up with as much correct math as you like, your results will always be shit.
Sort of. They won't say that 2+2=5. The errors are in the isomorphism they claim and the empirical assumptions they make.
Two of my favorites:
Almost all of economics assumes normal distributions. We have good reason to believe that almost no economic variables are normally distributed. That means we routinely underestimate tail risk. We do it anyway because that's the only way we can get the math to work.
Almost all of modern economics assumes utility functions with transitive preferences. Testing shows that even the economists who published those theories don't have transit preferences.
Sounds like you're complaining more about politicians and pundits than actual economists.
It's like saying you don't trust geologists because they assume that the world is 4,000 years old. They don't - just some idiots in charge do.
There's plenty of "actual" economists like that, and unfortunately some of them are among the generally most listened to, they lead prominent institutes and advise my home country's government.
If they make those assumptions, they are not economists, they are politicians. Learning to distinguish the difference is the same skillset boomers need to pick up on in relation to real images and AI generation... Clearly you lack in that department.
I went into a nat science major because animals are cool, and end up being a bunch of statistics and unfun math. I want my money back.
Please don’t lump statistics in with unfun math
It’s usually taught horribly and used poorly, with a large helping of superstition and rituals.
If you actually get to use it in a context where you’re not pulling some predecided methods out of a black box of tools chosen by people who don’t know statistics but want to avoid their publisher asking questions, it’s pretty fun.
You — I like you.
I hated how statistics was taught in my university science course. I did a ton of extra advanced modules when I was doing my A levels before university, so I learned more stats than most people do in high school. This just made the poor statistics taught to biochemists all the more confusing. There were things that they taught that were straight up wrong, and it really made me doubt myself.
I ended up going away and learning statistics in a more thorough way, which ended up being a lot of fun. In a weird way, I'm glad for how grim the stats course was because it led me to a much deeper understanding than I'd have gotten otherwise
Yeah, half of my statistics learnding was awful. Actually using it to study genetics? Fuck. Yes.
ITT: People who have never studied economics incorrectly diagnosing all of its problems
ITT: People incapable of justifying the scientific basis of economics.
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).
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.
R. Munroe, 2012
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.
I always considered economics, philosophy, theology and law as (important) academic subjects which are not sciences.
A PhD is a doctor of philosophy.
Indeed. But the sense of these words changed since they were adopted. Originally they just meant “teacher of general studies”.
I like to think that they evolved in parallel, as Philosophy underpins all interpretations.
I've tried explaining this to people, and they just don't get it. They say philosophy is just some pointless, meaningless, armchair activity. I tell them, "All fields of study are a subdiscipline of philosophy" and they call me a misinformed idiot.
Like, dude, whatever you study, the field itself wouldn't exist if it wasn't first developed by philosophers upon a philosophical foundation that was in turn developed by generations of philosophers.
The history of philosophy is the history of human ideas and of humanity itself. All of the sciences, both hard and soft, are simply highly specialized fields of philosophy.
Something that I often end up ranting about when I've had a few drinks at the pub is how I wish that all science education included some philosophy. I don't mean as a brief, one off unit, but actually woven throughout.
I actually got really into learning about the philosophy of science because I found this insufficiency became apparent when learning about machine learning systems in the context of bioinformatics and protein structure prediction. There were some absolutely brain-dead takes in papers that seemed to believe that big data methods have the potential of basically removing scientists from the process of science. Fortunately, there were also papers that called this out as nonsense, because expert knowledge is more important than ever in building and using machine learning systems.
Shout out to Sabine Leonelli, author of Data-Centric Biology: A Philosophical Study, which was the book I read that looked at this in detail. Her work is what really cemented my passion for the philosophy of science, and got me into philosophy more generally.
Yup, if someone is simply applying the scientific method without truly understanding its theoretical underpinnings, what are they really doing?
It's like driving a car with no mechanical knowledge. Not impossible, but if something goes wrong with the internal structures of it then you won't be able to figure out the problem and fix it on your own without seeking the help of someone who understands it.
And to be honest, I've seen a lot of dogmatic assertions from self-proclaimed atheists who view themselves as scientifically-minded while having no understanding of the philosophy of science.
Empiricism is great for what it's good for, but it's limited to observable phenomena. And without rationalism, it's like having a bunch of pieces of a puzzle and being unable to fit them together.
Here's a fact, here's another fact, and here's a third fact, but whether we realize it or not, we can't construct those facts into a coherent argument which leads to an accurate conclusion without utilizing rational processes. It's like focusing on factual soundness without paying any mind to logical validity.
And I see so many scientists making logical leaps that are quite simply invalid or fallacious. The most common one I see is "There's not enough evidence to support this hypothesis, therefore it must be untrue." It commits the fallacy of negating the antecedent.
I've seen this xkcd expanded with philosophy way off to the right saying something like "hey, what are all of you talking about over there?" since philosophy was the first asking "how?" or "why?" and all the others came later as more directed persuits of those individual questions. Philosophy first and foremost teaches logic and rhetoric, through which all sciences rely on.
This one?
https://lemmy.zip/comment/24226034
Kinda, but that one's a different edit referencing it coming full circle with philosophy on both sides. The specific edit I'm referring to just has philosophy wayyyyyyy off to the right, doesn't have sociology saying that(which I've never heard before and doesn't make sense) and doesn't have the logicians addition either.
While I get your point and don't necessarily disagree, I do think it's important to give philosophy a little more credit. Philosophy was what eventually came up with the idea of proving your claims and providing evidence to back that up. Logic and the scientific method were the creations of philosophy. Math was originally a philosophy/religion/cult(the Cult of Pythagoras for one example)devoted to numbers and believing them to be the ultimate answer to the universes questions.
Philosophy is a soft science, sure, but it's core teachings are fundamental for everything else.
Math is doing the heavy lifting, economics is just borrowing the muscles and hoping no one notices. 😄
The question I always tend to have, when the subject of if economics is or isn't a science comes up is: given that economies and trade are clearly things that exist (to the extent that any sort of human social interaction exists anyway), and that have measurable properties, it at least ought to be theoretically possible to analyze their behavior using the techniques of science. If you don't think economics is a science, then if you were to use science to study those things, what field would you consider that work to belong to?
Economics is scientific. Someone could argue that many aspects of neoclassical economics specifically are not scientific, but the study of economic phenomena would remain a scientific endeavor nonetheless.
I believe economics should be a field of magical studies, which should be a field of psychology. Magical studies should also study the placebo effect, memetics, religious studies, somatopsychic and psychosomatic phenomena, faith exercise science, servitorology, parogenetics, and spellcrafting.
Magic is just science without the burden of coherent theories that predict reliable experimental outcomes, which covers a lot more than psychology. I'd say it's more like humanity spitballing science-ish ideas and seeing which ones pan out, than any one branch of science specifically.
No, magic is observable phenomena caused by things that aren't real, where "real"ness is a social construct. Thus, magical studies is a field exploring the engineering of social constructs.
I'm not sure what realness has to do with it. Magic tends to have some kind of theoretical framework to explain observable phenomena (god(s), the planets, "energies", etc.) the same way scientific theories do, they even have some experimental frameworks (e.g. my church growing up had a cadre of old ladies who were touted as "good at praying" because they apparently had a good track record with the man upstairs. To my knowledge these claims were never validated in a properly controlled laboratory environment against a random sample of similar parishioners. They also happened to be voracious gossips who wielded private information as a weapon, which is a funny coincidence.) The phenomena that magic explains are "real" insofar as they are experiences that humans have, but the underpinning theories are often unfalsifiable and/or contradictory ("prayer works" and "god's plan is unknowable and perfect, eternal and unchanging"). That's what I mean about coherent theories and predictable results. I guess you could say that theories that make accurate predictions are "more real" but I don't think it makes sense to think about the realness of a scientific theory. It's either proven false or not proven false so far.
Well, the whole point of magic and what makes it different from regular technology is that it straddles the border between consensus reality and the socially unreal. Otherwise, why wouldn't it just be called technology?
And while I did not do so under laboratory conditions, I do have a case study of using magic to cure sleep apnea.
I would love to perform a replication study of this treatment, but I believe we first need to develop a stronger field of faith exercise science. I believe the patient's strength of faith is a significant variable in these kinds of treatments, and thus we need a reliable faith measurement system so that we can control for faith. Otherwise our results will appear random and unreliable.
So here is My plan to verify the reproducibility of magical disease treatments:
I think magic does get called technology, once we construct a sufficiently rigorous way to test its predictions and those predictions are validated. The first thing that comes to mind is the old folk remedy of using willow bark to treat fever. I don't know if that specific treatment was ever described as "magic" per se, but for a broad swath of human history it was a rule: if fever, then willow bark. It was also used in a bunch of other remedies that didn't work, and there were (still are) a ton of folk remedies for fever that either didn't work or actively worsened the situation, but the combination of willow bark and fevers was eventually validated, salicin was identified as the active agent, and it became a technological commodity. Some magics, like homeopathy, have been scientifically _in_validated, and therefore get relegated to outside the domain of scientific inquiry. Some, like phrenology, gain broad acceptance within a scientific establishment before they are convincingly invalidated and discarded. Some, like astrology, are broadly scientifically rejected but still have a broad lay appeal for non-scientific reasons.
I think the testing of any magical effect is the same as the testing of anything non-magical. The Chaos Magick Servitor sounds like a useful mental model for "learning a new thing". If it is proven an effective therapy in clinical trials for apnea, is it no longer magic? I just don't find the question of whether it's magic an interesting one in that case. I still want to understand the underlying mechanisms, possibly by conducting trials on which skills can be taught via the "Chaos Magick Servitor" method vs. a control, call it the "Mundane Learning of a Brain Technique" method. You could control for faith by surveying participants before sorting them into groups and blinding testers until the test is complete. If faith in Chaos Magick, or the Servitor technique, is predictive of being able to control apnea via that method, I would expect strong believers in the "Chaos Magick Servitor" method to get better results than their non-believing cohorts, and relatively little difference between believers and non-believers in the control group. One potential downside is that I don't really know of a good method for measuring "faith" other than self-reporting, but I think if the participant pool is large enough you could probably still get some convincing results as long as you're content to measure effectiveness vs "self-reported faith" rather than "actual faith". I don't know that there's a reliable way to know someone's innermost heart so that might be the best you can do with our current technology.
In addition to surveying for current faith strength, you could poll for faith-adjacent wants or beliefs, e.g. "In general, do you want your faith in Chaos Magick to be stronger, weaker, or stay the same?" This would give you an additional dimension that could let you test multiple hypotheses at once: instead of just having high faith and low faith, you could have six groups: high-aspirational, high-avoidant, high-content, low-aspirational, low-avoidant, and low-content. If these groups show significant variation in how well they use the Chaos Magick Servitor method, that could illuminate how one's current faith and their belief about what their faith "should" be affect the treatment, and how those two factors interact. I'd also be curious to see if there would be any differences among the different faith groups in the control group. It could well be that low faith individuals show no benefit, or that they show more improvement with a more scientific sounding presentation of the same concept.
I think "Faith based technology" is a fine working definition of magic for most practical uses. Many people say if something requires faith to work, it's magic and not science. But I believe we can use science on faith the same as we can use science on anything else.
Capitalist economics only work if society has faith in the money issuing authority (e.g. the US federal reserve). Money is a faith based technology and therefore magic. So I think economics should be a field of magical theory. Magicians seem more qualified to answer economic questions than mathematicians. When we let mathematicians do economics, they start making up nonsense like perfectly free markets, because they're not used to human fallibility. Magicians are perfectly aware of human fallibility, and that's why we should be in charge of the science of economics. We know capitalism is a scam, just like horoscopes or three card monte.
I think that economics is a science, but contrary to the insistence of many economists I have known, it is absolutely a soft science. This is not a pejorative (though I reluctantly admit that I used to view it as such). My view is that economists would be wise to learn from their fellow social scientists in other fields. That would do a lot to help improve the rigour of economics.
You raise an interesting point, but there's more to science than just measuring stuff. Most of my beef with economics comes from how economists react when their model's predictions don't align with reality. If a physicist's theory makes incorrect predictions, then there's not really much wiggle room to explain away the problem. If a psychologist's theory makes predictions that aren't correct, then my impression is that "explaining away" errors by gesturing at additional complexities not able to be accounted for is a much more acceptable thing to happen. This isn't necessarily bad, but rather seems to be a part of how knowledge production happens in the social sciences.
I can't comment too much on the specifics, as I am very much not a social scientist. Like I said above though, I have come around from looking down on these fields. In fact, I've come to appreciate them precisely because the skills used in the soft sciences are so alien to me. Economics uses a heckton of quantitative methods, but the phenomena they study are fundamentally social in nature, and thus they reduce the utility of their work by trying to distance themselves from the social sciences
You hit the nail on the head
Depends on the question itself.
A different comment makes a compelling argument for it being an anthropology. If anthropology is "just" psychology of a culture, then economics is a specific offshoot of that, one focusing primarily on trade systems/money use.
99% of the time it's just astrology for men.
Son of math and sociology
Most of the time it's just people working backward from whatever conclusion suits their politics.
In real life the tax return shows you the best math, or you are fucked.
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.
Marx was an economist too
His theory was certainly expanded upon by a great deal of European thinkers later on, though he provided strong foundations.
Math is for useless things like solving Diophantine equations or playing with primes. I will not have math slandered by associating it with applications.
Economics is the math of political science.
I actually would like economics more if I didn't have dyscalculia.
If math had emotions
Economics is the fakest science ever. It's just perpetuating the capitalist scheme. Don't waste your time learning it. It'll all be irrelevant in the end anyways.
wins a Nobel
So the moderator of science memes does not know a single thing about modern economics and its empirical methodology. What a joke.