• technocrit@lemmy.dbzer0.comEnglish
        6·
        6 days ago

        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.

  • nonentity@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
    375·
    7 days ago

    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.

    • gandalf_der_12te@discuss.tchncs.deEnglish
      31·
      6 days ago

      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.

      • nonentity@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
        51·
        6 days ago

        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.

      • captainlezbian@lemmy.worldEnglish
        1·
        6 days ago

        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

    • Knock_Knock_Lemmy_In@lemmy.worldEnglish
      1·
      6 days ago

      The opposite. Its power is inversely proportional to the belief it commands.

      The efficient market hypothesis only works if people don’t believe it.

    • technocrit@lemmy.dbzer0.comEnglish
      1·
      6 days ago

      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).

  • gandalf_der_12te@discuss.tchncs.deEnglish
    18·
    6 days 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 and do proofs about.

  • FE80@lemmy.worldEnglish
    111·
    6 days ago

    Any “scientific” field that produces Art Laffer is a fraud.

  • sga@piefed.socialEnglish
    10·
    6 days ago

    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).

  • Meron35@lemmy.worldEnglish
    206·
    7 days ago

    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.

    • chuckleslord@lemmy.worldEnglish
      24·
      7 days ago

      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.

    • Riverside@reddthat.comEnglish
      11·
      5 days ago

      I commend your appreciation of the field as a science, but you should also acknowledge that 80% of what’s currently taught in the academia about economics is just wrong. Supply and demand (unfalsifiable and shitty predictive capabilities compared to the falsifiable and empirically proven labour theory of value) is just one example in the long list of econ-101 bullshit.

      Regardless, as an appreciator of economics, have you checked out econophysics? The study of economics as a thermodynamical system. It’s wonderful, with predictive capabilities on for example salary distributions in capitalist economies, Paul Cockshott has a book and a few introductory videos on his YouTube channel

      • Meron35@lemmy.worldEnglish
        5·
        6 days ago

        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

        • counterfactual@sopuli.xyzEnglish
          11·
          3 days ago

          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.

    • trolololol@lemmy.worldEnglish
      13·
      6 days ago

      Economics does run randomised Control trials. Economics does adhere to testable hypotheses. Economics does use rigorous statistics/maths.

      Psychology too mate. Both use the scientific method, but the premise that all experiments are under full control doesn’t apply to them.

  • YetiBeets@lemmy.worldEnglish
    154·
    7 days ago

    ITT: People who have never studied economics incorrectly diagnosing all of its problems

    • Riverside@reddthat.comEnglish
      21·
      6 days ago

      Economics as a field in theory is great. The problem is that it’s been hijacked by capitalism, and 90% of the stuff taught in faculties is antiscientific. The founding grounds of neoliberal economics lay in the Austrian school, which prides itself in being non-falsifiable by evidence. Anything stemming from there is a pile of dogshit. Marxian economics and Modern Monetary Theory, on the other hand, have wonderful predictive capabilities and are proper science

  • nednobbins@lemmy.zipEnglish
    174·
    7 days ago

    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.

    • Don_alForno@feddit.orgEnglish
      161·
      7 days ago

      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.

      • nednobbins@lemmy.zipEnglish
        71·
        7 days ago

        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:

        1. 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.

        2. 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.

      • droans@lemmy.worldEnglish
        51·
        7 days ago

        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.

        • Don_alForno@feddit.orgEnglish
          23·
          6 days ago

          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.

          • counterfactual@sopuli.xyzEnglish
            12·
            4 days ago

            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.

  • massive_bereavement@fedia.io
    12·
    7 days ago

    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.

    • panda_abyss@lemmy.caEnglish
      101·
      7 days ago

      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.

      • AnarchistArtificer@slrpnk.netEnglish
        9·
        7 days ago

        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

  • Iron Lynx@lemmy.worldEnglish
    71·
    7 days ago

    By dubbing econ “dismal science” adherents exaggerate;
    The “dismal”'s fine - it’s “science” where they patently prevaricate.

    R. Munroe, 2012

    • dustyData@lemmy.worldEnglish
      21·
      7 days ago

      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.