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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.
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.
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.
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…
classic economic theory
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.
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.
Kinda tough for an academic to run meaningful experiments
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.
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, 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
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).
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
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.
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
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.
“Economics is basically math” is one of the greatest PR stunts that anybody ever pulled. Mainstream economics is pseudoscience sprinkled with some maths so people take it more seriously, it has barely any more predictive power than palm reading.
The main reason being that if they actually did the math in good faith, the outcomes wouldn’t fit the preordained conclusions. A researcher recently wrote about his experiences trying to get a bad study retracted and being stonewalled.
Economics is just statistics but they ignore half the data that goes into it. It’s homeopathic statistics.
And economics is inherently chaotic, with near identical inputs to a system resulting in wildly different outputs.
ed:sp
“yo it’d be funny if we invested in Playstation”
Boom, all the predictions just went out the window
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 firet 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.
This one?
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.
Bro, hear me out, what if I buy some of your company, bro, and you buy some of my company, and then we, like, keep buying and selling slices of our own companies back and forth to each other?
Bro we’re gonna generate so much economy from this. We’re gonna generate trillions in value, bro, just trading back and forth.
… wait… product? What product?
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:
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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.
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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.
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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.
ITT: People who have never studied economics incorrectly diagnosing all of its problems
ITT: People incapable of justifying the scientific basis of economics.
I like the variations
Agriculture is only 12,000 years old. I suspect there are many more possible levels.
