Submitted 17 hours ago by fossilesque@mander.xyz to science_memes@mander.xyz
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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.
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.
ITT: People who have never studied economics incorrectly diagnosing all of its problems
Economics is basically social psychology with some numbers sprinkled in.
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
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.
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.
By dubbing econ “dismal science” adherents exaggerate;
The “dismal”'s fine - it’s “science” where they patently prevaricate.
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 - en.wikipedia.org/…/Oregon_Medicaid_health_experim…
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 - www.nobelprize.org/prizes/…/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 - 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
it’s 90% lobbying and propaganda, 10% math
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…
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?
Economics is a funny one because you do need maths, but ultimately it’s a focused & technical stand of anthropology (which I believe is considered a science by many)
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.
Most of them are pretty bad at anthro too tbh lol
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.
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
it’s a focused & technical strand of anthropology (which I believe is considered a science by many)
…
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.
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.
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.
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.
“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.
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
And economics ks inherently chaotic, with near identical inputs to a system resulting in wildly different outputs.
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 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
I always considered economics, philosophy and theology 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”.
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, paragenetics, 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.
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
Depends on the question itself.
In real life the tax return shows you the best math, or you are fucked.
gandalf_der_12te@discuss.tchncs.de 1 hour ago
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.
Jankatarch@lemmy.world 52 minutes ago
Writing a png file by hand currently and ngl this feels like 90% law school and 10% math.