Stop using this abusive, fascist sycophant as a meme template.
Damn right. Fuck Crowder. Abusive spouse, sexually abusive co-worker.
First you would have to find someone who thought economics were closer to physics.
No, at least someone who graduated kindergarden.
Theres an interesting book on it, literally “Physics of wall street”. Or that was the literal name translated from my language. It explored the similarities between the two, can recommend.
Thanks, looks like an interesting book. Looks like he also wrote on misinformation.
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And even psychology is extremely dubious. Just look at the recent Stanford scandal, and the replication crisis a few year ago…
Unfortunately, publication pressure turned psychology into total junk. You can’t really believe anything unless several other institutions replicated the experiments (and good luck getting funding for that).
You can’t really believe anything unless several other institutions replicated the experiments (and good luck getting funding for that.)
Shouldn’t that be the case with every scientific discipline?
I agree.
Economics, sociology and political science are the trifecta of sciences that cover human societies, rather than human individuals.
Psychology is closer to medicine. It is complex and unpredictable, because humans are complex and unpredictable, but they approach the subject empirically and can actually achieve consistentcy. For example, we are getting really good at helping people with PTSS, ADHD, Autism, learning difficulties, etc.
I would say economics, sociology and political science are at the lowest rung on the “certainty” totempole. These sciences are forever stuck in the “we don’t know what we don’t know, so we are driving blind” mode of operation. They only succeed in analysing and narrating what happened after the fact. At best, they prevent us from repeating some mistakes in the most obvious ways. But they also enable us to repeat old mistakes in novel ways.
The only reason people confuse economics with the hard sciences, is because it has a Nobel prize.
But it really should be seen as an equivalent to the Nobel peace and literature prizes, in a separate league of the physics, medicine and chemistry ones.
Even economists themselves call their science the dismal science.
All this said, Economists are true and capable scientists (well, some are corrupt and biased, but some doctors are, too. That’s not an indictment of the whole field).
Their subject is just difficult to analyze.
I mean, define experimental?
Daniel Kahneman won the 2002 Nobel prize in economics for his research on the psychology of judgement and decision making, which drives our economic models. He’s a psychologist.
Any definition of experimental that fits psychology will fit economics.
Sociology is an actual science with a methodology and it tries to learn from other sciences.
Economy considers it pure like maths despite the evidences it is not the case.
Economy is pseudo-science at its best.
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We’ve had 3 “once in a lifetime” financial meltdowns in like 25 years now.
Our banks need bailing out like every 10 years.
The arrogance of thinking that we’ve figured out the economy even in the Newtonian sense is part of why, I think.
Like, I hear you, but at the same time it just doesn’t align with even the broadest observations.
And when a theory doesn’t align with observed data, I have to be critical of the theory…
I’m interested in if you can expand your explanation to account for it, though. It’s super low stakes and I don’t think it’s really possible to prove any of it so I think it’s a great subject for thought experiments.
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Hard science — inquiry into the nature of the “hard materials” like rocks.
Social science — inquiry into shared meanings on the material stuff around us, including the “hard materials” like mountains, and “soft intangible stuff” like taboos and beliefs, prices, and demand.
A lot of people assume “hard” means the serious stuff and social science as the easy and abstract stuff. Nothing could be further from the truth.
Economics is a social science. Sadly, the fascination with it being “hard” is largely to be seen as the cool tough stuff. Inferiority complex, if you may.
That’s dubious. Considering that economists deliberately ignore strong established psychological theories to make theirs work. Economical theory also runs contrary to a lot of established notions of sociology. Economics is closer to politics than to any science.
No one here has acknowledged the difference between classical economics and neoclassical economics (or even the difference with post-keynesian economics). Classical economics makes descriptions and predictions that can be falsified.
It also takes into account social context by understanding the social forces that come into play in a society at a given point. For example, the profit motive is understood as a historical force reinforced by capitalism itself.
All of this is modeled in a stochastic manner, which reflects both the variation in human behavior and the strong tendencies in human behavior. Once again, these models are testable.
All of this contrasts with the idealized and unscientific notion of economics that was cooked up at the end of the 18th century: neoclassical economics. This is what is taught to most people.
Neoclassical economics doesn’t seek to describe the forces that motivate human beings as much as assume that people are utility maximizers. Therefore, social context is explained reductively. Predictions are harder, because what leads the way isn’t evidence, but assumptions. Of course, there’s a political component to not show capitalism as a historical reality as much as both a reflection of universal truths of human nature and a desirable social arrangement.
It’s sad to confirm that neoclassical economics has dominated the economics departments and school curricula of the world. However, many scholars fortunate enough to be given a stable job despite not believing in the contemporary doctrine are doing amazing work. For example, Shaikh.
With this in mind, classical economics has to resemble physics to the extent that physics describes stochastic processes. In fact, Shaikh explicitly recognizes that pressure as a measure is a stochastic measure because, even though you can’t predict the trajectory of a single atom, you can predict how many atoms will interact on an aggregate level. The same happens with humans.
Economics is an extremely broad field, encompassing things that are closely related to psychology (e.g. behavioral economics), and things that are related to physics and natural science (e.g ecological economics), as well as pure mathematics (e.g. game theory) so trying to say it has more in common with one than the other is kind of a vacuous statement or category error.
To those who are angry at normative claims and policy prescriptions from the economic orthodoxy/zeitgeist, I understand your frustration. I would say what you’re angry at is not economics itself (which is simply the study of scarcity and related human behavior) but economics done badly. Such as the Chicago school.
Setting aside the emotional baggage related to these issues, there are some really beautiful and fascinating topics in economics that borrow very directly from statistical physics in the analysis of financial time series data (and also apply to a wide variety of fields like network traffic, the distribution of metals in ore, turbulent flows in fluid dynamics, and the distribution of galaxies in space), originally identified by Benoit Mandelbrot.
It’s crazy how much people will vehemently defend a position with little to no knowledge of the subject. It’s easy to just pin it on the dunning-kruger effect, but in this case I think it’s definitely tied to how much people despise economists. Which I find kinda funny since it’s like getting angry at the weatherman for bad weather.
Also, are there any communities dedicated to actually discussing economics? I’d really like to spitball actual solutions to a shitty economy rather than the wishful thinking capitalists & communists rely on.
I can sympathize with them, as the way economic thought is portrayed in popular journalism makes it seem like ivory tower eggheads concocting overly-mathematized models to support bad policies. And I do believe there is some truth to this, with bad economists hiding shitty ideas behind the veneer of respectability that math provides. Science and technology are almost fetishized in our culture, especially by those who don’t really study them academically, and I believe disingenuous economists and politicians use this fact to their advantage.
What they must realize is that whatever flaws they might identify to overhaul these bad economic models leads to… more economics! Hopefully better economics. But they’re still participating in the field known as economics.
For instance, noting that the “homo economicus” doesn’t exist IRL isn’t really the gotcha that many people think it is. Rather, anybody doing economics properly is acutely aware of this fact, and is just exploring the limits of what such a simplifying assumption can yield. E.g. a surprisingly large mileage from the very parsimonious axioms of utility given by Von Neumann and Morgenstern. The really interesting and difficult part is thinking about how and why real life data deviates from the predictions made by the simple assumptions.
Making such reasonable and well thought comments under the name “Prager U” should be a crime.
Behavioral economics was my favorite and I’d say it’s tied closely to game at its core, they’re both trying to predict human choices game theory just tries to quantify it with math. None of it is “pure math” it’s all theory with math attempting to support it. It’s only in like the last 100 years math even came into economic theory. I always enjoyed reading theory from the less recent economists (before they were even called economists) because it’s more pure theory/philosophy.
Steven Crowder is an assclown.
Exam questions are the same every year. But the answers are different.
Pretty sure this isn’t that controversial of an opinion. Pretty sure any economist that disagrees with you is a shit economist. There’s a reason there’s a related field called “socioeconomics”
Also fuck this meme format. Stop using this facist for memes.
the number of comments here who use hard sciences’ criteria as the ones and only defining the validity of knowledge is concerning. Human sciences don’t have the same foundations, methodologies, etc. as harde sciences, they don’t have the same system of validation either, which doesn’t mean it’s less valid.
Does it matter tho? It’s all useful in some way or another.
Well, as a matter of fact, economy is actually detrimental to societies.
You might need to back that up with info…
Climate change? Inequalities on the rise?
That’s an element of economics.
But economics as a whole? Start having up claims with info.
Now hold on guys… I think I would put it slightly more useful than reading tea leaves.
Economics is a branch of philosophy. It doesn’t just observe norms, it creates them. Any descriptive model in economics is also prescriptive.
If a well-regarded economist publicly says the stock market will crash tomorrow, then it will crash, regardless of the soundness of their logic leading up to the statement — even if it was the result of a cocaine binge, botched autocorrect, or a stroke.
This is why treating economics like a hard science is so dangerous. If the prevailing “thought leaders” advocate for a model that says XYZ people are mathematically doomed to live in abject, dehumanizing squallor… then that’s exactly what will happen, regardless of whether that was true before they said it.
Edit: It’s also why it’s such a crime that we only teach neoclassical economics in K-12, as if it’s the One True Way™.
