Comment on Theories on Theories
supersquirrel@sopuli.xyz 1 month ago
Economics: Our findings our just as rigorous as these other sciences we swear!
I once called economics a pseudoscience in a reddit comment and some libertarian-capitalist type got suuuper butthurt about it.
He said I don’t understand the word pseudoscience. I said, “no I understand it just fine. You don’t understand economics.”
His only response was to call that a “no, you” argument. Dunning-Kruger on full display.
Basic foundational “observations” by Economics aren’t based on the Scientific Method.
I wish the Scientific Method didn’t have “Method” in the name because while it is a sensible name it also is misleading.
Science is method agnostic, that is a necessary and sometimes brutal aspect to scientific progress, a new promising method may uncover other methods and theories that totally pull the rug out from under old theories.
Economics, because it began and is sustained for the most part as a system of methods searching for justification for their continuation, is largely incapable of undergoing these necessary “method resets” that come periodically in any scientific discipline.
Thus no matter if locally good science is being done in economics it is undermined by the uncomfortable need to preserve the survival of the foundatinal contextualizing methods and axioms they invoke implicitly from the truth uncovered, a vice that plagues any human endeavor consciously and subconsciously and not only keeps Economics from being a real science it also largely sucks the oxygen out of the room for actually scientifically rigorous study of these phenomena.
Any time I’ve attempted to argue for alternative economic paradigms (not just alternative economic systems, but actually rethinking the fundamental assumptions and theories by which we study and attempt to understand economic systems and phenomena), lazy thinkers hit me with the “nuh uh, that’s not what [classical economic theory] says! You don’t know what you’re talking about.”
It’s a thoughtless appeal to authority lacking any substance. The word for that is “dogma.”
I think a major casualty of the war on science funded primarily by fossil fuel interests has been that the kneejerk pro-science response has become a lazy appeal to authority.
People say “99% of scientists all agree listen to them you are not worthy of having an opinion on this!” and while it is true, it also sends an undermining message to the interests of science.
Science is the practice of skepticism not of finding facts. Facts are the inevitable residue of science after science has subjected a theory to extended and diverse torturous inquisition.
I wish people defended science by saying it isn’t a set of Correct Facts but a system of Skepticism that has thoroughly examined a shared body of knowledge and that you should assume that if the more fantastic sounding theories contained within that arena of Skeptical Melee haven’t been dismantled that you can probably trust that they are real as fantastic as they sound.
This when you shortens it sounds like an appeal to authority where the scientists are given undue authority but it is not the same thing. What matters is the environment of genuine skepticism that scientific theories and “facts” are subjected to in order to establish their validity that matters not the theories and facts themselves.
I like the term Scientific filter. Theories get endlessly filtered though experimentation untill we get purer and purer truth.
What definition of pseudoscience would capture economics without capturing medicine, ecology, or meteorology?
Everyone’s just using models here, and the way we incorporate statistical observations to define the limits of the models’ scope, and refine the models over time, or reject the models entirely, applies to economists, meteorologists, seismologists, and many branches of actual human medicine.
Popper would define pseudoscience as predictions that can’t be falsified, but surely that can’t apply to the idea of the weatherman predicting rain and being wrong, right?
Kuhn came along and argued that science is about solving problems within paradigms, and sometimes rejecting paradigms in scientific revolutions (geocentrism vs heliocentrism, Newtonian physics versus Einstein’s relativity), but it wasn’t a particularly robust test for separating out pseudoscience.
Lakatos categorized things further at explaining how model-breaking observations could be handled within the structure of how science performs its work (limiting the scope of the model, expanding the complexity of the model to fit the new observations, proposing specific exception handlers), but also observed the difference between the hard core of a discipline, in which attempts at refutation were not tolerated, and auxiliary hypotheses where the scientists were free to test their ideas for falsifiability.
But when you use these ideas to try to understand how science works, I don’t think economics really stands out as less scientific than cancer research or climatology or other statistically driven scientific disciplines.
To quote the order commenter here, basic foundational “observations” by Economics aren’t based on the Scientific Method.
In what way? And how does that differ from how medicine measures pain?
A weatherman predicting rain has made a falsifiable prediction, how does that relate to Popper?
how does that relate to Popper?
When a weatherman’s prediction is falsified, the model itself is not disproven. The fact that the practitioners of that discipline stick with it even when a prediction is falsified starts to look like the pseudoscience side of Popper’s falsifiability criterion.
It’s amazing how nonsensical the actual foundational axioms of modern day economics are.
Classical economics tried to tie economics to functions of physical things we can measure. Adam Smith for example proposed that because you can recursively decompose every product into the amount of physical units of time it takes to produce it all the way down the supply chain, then any stable economy should, on the average (not the individual case), roughly buy and sell in a way that reflects that time, or else there would necessarily have to be physical time shortages or waste which would lead to economic problems.
Many people had philosophical objections to this because it violates free will. If you can predict roughly what society will do based on physicals factors, then you are implying that people’s decisions are determined by physical parameters. Humans have the “free will” to just choose to buy and sell at whatever price they want, and so the economy cannot be reduced beyond the decisions of the human spirit. There was thus a second school of economics which tried to argue that maybe you could derive prices from measuring how much people subjectively desire things, measured in “utils.”
“Utils” are of course such ambiguous nonsense that eventually these economists realized that this cannot work, so they proposed a different idea instead, which is measure things into marginal rates of substitution. Rather than saying there is some quantifiable parameter of “utils,” you say that every person would be willing to trade some quantity of object X for some quantity of object Y, and then you try to define the whole economy in terms of these substitutions.
However, there are two obvious problems with this.
The first problem is that to know how people would be willing to substitute things rigorously, you would need an incredibly deep and complex understanding of human psychology, which the founders of neoclassical economics did not have. Without a rigorous definition, you could not fit it to mathematical equations. It would just be vague philosophy.
How did they solve this? They… made it up. I am not kidding you. Look up the axioms for consumer preference theory whenever you have the chance. It is a bunch of made up axioms about human psychology, many of which are quite obviously not even correct (such as, you have to assume that the person has evaluated and rated every product in the entire economy, you have to assume that every person would be more satisfied with having more of any given object, etc), but you have to adopt those axioms in order to derive any of the mathematics at all.
The second problem is one first pointed out, to my knowledge, by the economist Nikolai Bukharin, which is that an economic model based around human psychology cannot possibly even be predictive because there is no logical reason to believe that the behavior of everything in the economy, including all social structures, is purely derivative of human psychology, i.e. that you cannot have a back-reaction whereby preexisting social structures people are born into shape their psychology, and he gives a good proof-by-contradiction that the back-reaction must exist.
If it exists, then your model must take social structures to be just as “fundamental” as human psychology. The idea that you can derive everything based upon some arbitrary set of mathematical laws made up in someone’s armchair one day that supposedly rigorously details human behavior that is irreducible beyond anything else is just nonsense.
it’s also interesting how increasingly absurd economics gets the further it dissociates from reality.
people are dying
BUT THE DOW
Adam Smith was actually far more progressive than the neoliberal/capitalist propaganda like to portray him as. They basically cherry-pick his work and present it out of context to support arguments that are actually contrary to many of the points he was making…
When I said “classical economic theory” I meant more like “conventional economic theory,” so encompassing the absurdities you mentioned here.
Like, they’ll say “Economies naturally cycle through periods of growth and degrowth” to justify periods of inflation, but then when those periods of inflation are artificially extended to further enrich the shareholders (and artificially inflated, even!), they’ll conveniently ignore the whole “periods of degrowth” side of the coin, and if anything even remotely has a chance of causing deflation, it’s denounced as an anathema because “it would cause a recession!”
Corporations benefit from economies that harm consumers. Corporations should never be given control over economic policies. However, neoliberal economic policies are basically designed to help the corporations while hurting consumers. And it’s all founded upon conventional economic theories.
That’s how you end up with a Federal Reserve that says things like “Unemployment is a good thing, because if everyone has too much money to spend on things, it could cause inflation,” yet never addresses the standard business practice of increasing prices while cutting costs all to make “number go up” so that the shareholder value increases each quarter and the C-suite can get bigger bonuses…
They say things like “We have to raise prices to keep up with inflation,” but no, that’s literally just contributing to artificial inflation, which is apparent when you look at their profit margins and how they’ve increased since 2020 when everyone started freaking out about inflation…
Oh, I see I’m not the only one who views it that way. It’s always nice to see some people who have professional credibility expressing a similar opinion.
Also, I didn’t know the “Noble Prize in Economics” wasn’t really a Nobel Prize at all (it’s not awarded by the Nobel Foundation! They basically just appropriated the name…)
I always thought it was strange that there was one at all (or seemed to be one), and I didn’t particularly like the credibility it seemed to lend to a field that doesn’t deserve it, but it makes so much more sense now to know it’s just a psyop run by a bank.
He was just a delusional living knot bot.
hahah same for psychology
Do they claim that though? Neo-liberal economists often adopt praxeology openly, and the other ones are mostly deluding themselves.
sbv@sh.itjust.works 1 month ago
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Chakravanti@monero.town 1 month ago
Well spoken, no less.