Economics started as a branch of philosophy that got a lot of support because it draw a lot of support for its theory from maths.
Then, more recently, a good number of very inteligent people noticed the behaviours of economic models could be better predict and understood by using very simple psychological analysis and models.
I remember reading an article by two physicists where they just picked the oh-so-precious math of a given economic model, analysed it using the methods used to analyse physics and concluded the model was faulty by x+y+z.
It isn’t a difficult science from a learner’s PoV.
It is, however, difficult in a sense of trying to figure out why in the world what happened happened, and most importantly, making it possible to do again.
That’s because not only can you not experiment, you only gather data from observations, but once you share the product of your studies the reality changes in reacton to it.
In same Physics the object of your studies doesn’t simultaniously study you.
Math gets involved to get a result that is somewhat reproducable. But even then since we can’t factor everything we use degrees of probability/certainty.
Theoretically speaking if we managed to fully understand human behaviour then we coult predict the outcome of everything. As you can imagine, we’re nowhere close to being able to do that.
Back to original post, yes, economics is closer to psychology than it is to physics. At least for the fact that we study human behaviour, but on a different scale. So sociology and political science are the closest, then psychology, next all of biological sciences, and chemistry, physics and everything related come last pretty much.
Math doesn’t fit anywhere here, since it’s a tool for measuring reality and not a study of reality itself.
Doctors of Mathematics know enough about modelling and the Garbage-in-Garbage-Out effect that they would quit the discipline of Economics within a few days of entering it.
In the areas were Economics deals with things with high Political Relevance you need the a salesman mindset - vague and self-decieving - which is almost the diametrical opposite of how Matematicians think.
Lmao what? Economists are dorks man, not salespeople. Do you actually know any economists or is this just an “I’m mad because economists don’t push communism” kind of thing
That doesn’t make any sense. Anything involving math is relatively easy because there’s only one right answer. A lot of people have this backwards because they have shitty math education and seem to think higher maths are akin to some kind of alchemy.
No one who has even the faintest idea of what physics is would be able to conflate it with economics. About the only way the two are related is that they’re both studied by people to the point that you can get a degree that focuses on either.
No science started out as a “hard science”. Psychology is hard to quantify yet, because our currently available options for measurements are insufficient.
? That would still be biology and therefore reducible to chemistry and physics.
The approach of “everything is reducible to physics” is actually a philosophical theory that tries to describe what is reality. Is the material world everything that exists? Or are our thoughts (our knowing of things) actually a different reality? Etc.
In the end, the differentiation into the different sciences is simply an aid for people. I wouldn’t pay it that much attention because it really doesn’t tell you anything.
Being reducible is part of it, but I think reproducible is more important. Psychology is not reproducible. You can get statistical equivalents, but not exact reproduction of results.
I think being reducible is all of it. Even if it’s reproducable you can know THAT something is true, but not WHY it’s true. I think the why, or at least the ability and intention to get there, makes something a hard science.
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.
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.
numerology surely. Because you can properly use mathematical operations and statisticsl tools in ways that are physically meaningless.
A sled-dog laden with taxidermied heads goes faster and faster as heads are removed. The economist is surprised but the biologist is not when removing the final head doesn’t make the dog run even faster, but stops it dead.
Mine wasn’t random. By showing up to spout some one liner you didn’t come up with, you’re acting as an instrument of someone else’s leverage, instead of as a participant in the discussion.
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.
I would actually love to hear you elaborate on that.
In what way sociologists work harder than economists?
I’d argue that when it comes to science, you can’t study economics without studying sociology and politics. Because then you will be lacking context. Wouldn’t that mean more research?
The invisible hand is just bullshit and prices in our economy are often centrally planned by a monopoly or a cartel that decides how an industry ought to set prices.
Not the OP and IMO centrally planned prices doesn’t really apply to cartels, but a cartel set price that nearly everyone is familiar with is OPEC+ prices for petroleum.
I think Aesthelete better cleared up what I am trying to say using OPEC as an example. Other versions of this behavior is in Dairy / Milk in the US. They’re wasting millions of gallons of milk in order to keep the price higher where it’s set by a central planner in the industry. Farmers will choose certain days to sell their crop as to try and get the highest price - and this is an innocent behavior - but capitalism literally has a built-in mechanism to encourage this form of price stability. Another bad example is poultry production in the US. There’s 4 companies only, and small farmers actually license and rent all of the stuff from the big 4. These farmers are treated so terribly, and at the end of the day they don’t actually get to sell or set the price. The central company does.
Economics is definitely a social science. Even the most business-bro economist would agree.
But I would actually argue it is closer to physics than philosophy*. At the macroeconomics scale, there are very solid trends and predictions to be made with very solid hypotheses as to why they occur. And in a small town, you can generally get away with a lot of the higher level aspects of microeconomics and make solid predictions. Gas stations thrive on this shit. But high frequency trading, as well as sites that let individuals buy whatever stocks they want, really do narrow the region that can actually be considered either one and instead we are looking at having to apply “micro” concepts across entire countries worth of people.
Which… is physics. Drop a ball from a platform? You can math out when it will hit the ground to the nearest second pretty easily. Want to go milliseconds? Now you probably need to take into account air resistance, but you can probably do that with some not overly complex simulations and wind tunnel experiments. But as the height increases and you start putting a rocket engine on the back of that device, just doing a fluid mechanics simulation in your CAD program of choice stops being viable and you start needing to consider the underlying material properties and possibly even doing molecular dynamics simulations under the hood.
And… that is kind of where we are with economics. We have the high level math and simulations. Newton’s Three Laws have been discovered and people can get a long way. But nobody really understands the underlying causes well enough to find the economic equivalent of the Theory of Relativity. And nobody has figured out how to run simulations that can take into account… still only a subset of the variables at play.
Personally? I supported a decent number of simulations of population movement and the like as part of the covid efforts. I strongly suspect there is some underlying “science of why humans do the shit we do” that nobody has properly codified yet, and Economics is a subset of that. Because the more you look beyond ECON 101 level concepts, the more it is clear that there IS strong logic underneath and that a lot of “predictions based on trends” are very much “I predict that if we kick the ball at this angle with this much force, it will go that distance” levels of science. But there are so many factors involved that nobody understand how to account for.
*: Going by the modern definition rather than the historic one where most hard sciences were wrapped up in philosophy. One of the reasons we have “Doctorate of Philosophy” for physics and the like. … Which also speaks to how naive this post is
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.
You’re making the mistake of thinking of this from the perspective of an end user. By the time you or I see anything, we have already done all economically viable simulations and are using the only approximations that “make sense” to use.
That does not at all mean that the people running those sims even think it will work. That means that the same report saying “Look, this might work if we get really lucky and none of these four hundred events that we can’t account for occurs” that execs then ignored because they either don’t understand or, understand well enough to know there is nothing that can be done.
Which is the other side of this. So much of modern physics and engineering is proprietary for corporate reasons. If Hyundai suddenly were to gain some new understanding of material science, they are going to exploit that. And the same is true where fundamental flaws in car/whatever designs are often treated as “How can people be so stupid and irresponsible as to do this” rather than… pretty much anyone with an understanding of the underlying math saying “So glad we didn’t try and do that”.
As for Newton’s Laws: Understand that, even though we call them “laws”, they are still theories. It is incredibly unlikely that we discover some new concept that flips our understanding of the world on its head and we discover that an object in motion will actually accelerate on its own if you get it to the exact right speed and THEN paint it red, but there are enough unknowns that we STILL can’t rule that out entirely. We can rule it out to the point that we would laugh at anyone suggesting otherwise… but would probably check their math if they suddenly had a proof.
Like, let’s look at one of those laws: The simplified verison is that an object in motion will stay in motion unless acted upon by an outside force. Now, we are all smart enough to understand that those outside forces include things like gravity, friction on the ground, and even friction from the air. But as you increase the speeds at which objects are moving, you suddenly have a LOT more factors to take into account where, depending on the math, even radiation can become an “outside force” to slowly (over millenia, if memory serves) slow down an object (take that one with a grain of salt as I forget if that has been “proven” yet or if the argument is that it is still just the particles themselves causing the deceleration or not).
I STRONGLY encourage people go out for drinks with scientists if you ever have the chance. Not grad students and professors (although, many do think of the same problems) but the engineers who work for companies and think tanks and government labs. You will RAPIDLY reach the point of “I have no fucking idea why it does that but the database says I substitute a ‘4’ for this property and stuff mostly works.”. You might even get lucky and someone will go on a rant about how the entire field are idiots for not listening to them because approximation X is actually a fundamentally flawed one and under very specific circumstances it will fail so that dipshit in management better give them a raise".
But yeah. People very much overestimate how much “science” has its shit together. We are mostly bouncing around and making informed hypotheses on what would and would not work. We just have the advantage of most of what we do costing so much money and requiring so many people that it is “safe but slow” to advance. Although… read some stories about the early atomic weapons programs around the world if you want to have trouble sleeping. And some of that is very much because: Good science reporting ignores that. It presents “theories” as “fact”. Because people are stupid. And saying “We believe your car will not spontaneously melt” is actively harmful. Whereas “Your car won’t melt and the battery is contained to the point that the passenger cabin is safe to the extent of all of our testing”
Whereas economics? They don’t have the luxury to not do something. People are going to buy and sell widgets regardless and you either get in on the widget trading or you might as well not exist. So you work to the extent you can and cross your fingers it works out. Which… is a lot like the early pioneers of flight. We love the Wright Brothers but a LOT of people died because their math was wrong or they didn’t understand a concept and the Wrights very much benefited from past experiments.
I mean, we see the exact same uncertainty all the time in real-world applications of the hard sciences as well.
Weather prediction, for example, is still just as inexact a science as macroeconomics in its application, even though it’s entirely physics-driven and we have a pretty complete understanding of each of the variables involved on a theoretical level. The system is just complex and chaotic enough that understanding the theory of weather doesn’t mean that we can successfully model the real-world behavior of weather.
This doesn’t mean that we should conclude that all theory relating to weather is incorrect - that would we throwing the baby out with the bathwater - it just means we still have a ways to go when modeling the real-world complexities that come with the theory.
I still don’t see this as an oranges to oranges comparison. Or even oranges to mandarins. Or oranges to limes.
I accept that both systems (weather and economics) are both “chaotic systems”. That doesn’t make them equivalent though. Some infinities are larger than others.
Trying to model the behaviour of a single human is an incredibly difficult task. Trying to model the behaviour of billions is harder. Then you need to blend in their relationships to eachother. Then you need to blend in their relationships with their means of sustainance. With their individual values. Etc etc etc.
I accept that some PORTONS of the models are pretty sound. Supply and demand curves? Sure.
I’ll hit you with a thought experiment:
If it’s the case that it’s just a matter of reading your econ textbook and then you can accurately model the economy, or even a small part of it, then extracting disproportionate wealth becomes a simple matter of doing some math.
Why isn’t every econ grad wealthy? Why are there wealthy people who run exactly the inverse plays? Why do the most powerful institutions require bailouts?
I’m not saying that the theory is bad, but it’s a masterbutory exercise. Applying the theory results is such disparate actual outcomes make it more like legend then law.
However, I personally think that the frequent rejection of that reality serves a different psychological purpose, which is the need to translate wealth distribution to an explainable system… Specifically one that explains favourably to people who already have the wealth.
Why am I rich and you’re poor? It’s simple: I merely understand the physics of the economy. You don’t. If you did, you would be where I am.
And, if someday you gain great wealth, it will be as a direct result of the actions you took, made with confidence as a result of unmistakable stimuli, that anyone could have done.
Understand me when I say I’m not discounting economic theory wholesale… Not at all. I am just saying giving it more credence than it truly deserves has a peripheral benefit in providing a justification for some kinda shitty social structures that exist now… That ALSO have science backing them. For example, the study of social mobility.
Trying to model the behaviour of a single human is an incredibly difficult task. Trying to model the behaviour of billions is harder. Then you need to blend in their relationships to eachother. Then you need to blend in their relationships with their means of sustainance. With their individual values. Etc etc etc.
Trying to model the behavior of a single eddy of wind is an incredibly difficult task. Trying to model the behavior of billions is harder. Then you need to blend in their relationships to eachother. Then you need to blend in their relationships with the causes of those individual eddies. With their individual values. Etc etc etc.
If it’s the case that it’s just a matter of reading your econ textbook and then you can accurately model the economy, or even a small part of it […]
It’s not the case. My entire comment was about why that’s not the case at all. Extracting disproportionate wealth is hard for the same reasons weather forecasting is hard. Not because of the theory, but because of the complexity of the system the theory describes.
I’m not saying that the theory is bad, but it’s a masterbutory exercise. Applying the theory results is such disparate actual outcomes make it more like legend then law.
You still haven’t shown how this is any different to applying the theory of weather forecasting, or applying the theory of plate tectonics and still failing to predict earthquakes, etc.
However, I personally think that the frequent rejection of that reality serves a different psychological purpose, which is the need to translate wealth distribution to an explainable system… Specifically one that explains favourably to people who already have the wealth.
You’re conflating the science of economics with the meta-discussion surrounding the politics of economics.
This is just like someone arguing that weather science is bullshit because we can’t successfully predict the weather, and it therefore only exists as an excuse to implement more damn liberal environmental policies.
The economist’s fundamental assumptions are wrong. The free market rational actor model is wholly incompatible with the ability of a finance or marketing industry to exist because marketing could never inform or convince anyone of anything and contracts can provide anything financialisation does without giving 10% of your income to someone who did nkthing. Given that both exist and together dominate the industry of the wealthiest countries, we know that none of it is real, and that the people pushing it also know this.
Psychology and physics are founded in empiricism, not post-hoc rationalisations of what the powerful wanted to do anyway.
The economist’s fundamental assumptions are wrong. The free market rational actor model is wholly incompatible with the ability of a finance or marketing industry to exist because marketing could never inform or convince anyone of anything and contracts can provide anything financialisation does without giving 10% of your income to someone who did nkthing.
This is either an intentional strawman of economic theory or a naive understanding based off a single Intro to Economics class.
It’s like arguing that physics’ fundamental assumptions are wrong because basic physics problems assume that cows are spheres with no air resistance.
Psychology and physics are founded in empiricism
A significant amount of modern economic research is empiricist, but even if it weren’t, empiricism and rationalism go hand-in-hand in scientific inquiry. Rationalism is what allowed Mendel to posit “units of inheritance” over a century before the existence of DNA was empirically verified, and Schwarzschild to posit the existence of black holes almost a century before black holes’ gravitational waves were first measured. Decades of productive research were had in advance of these empirical discoveries thanks to models built on rationalist inquiry, so “it’s not empiricist” isn’t quite the insult you seem to think it is.
Oh. You were serious with the “it doesn’t matter if it conflicts with reality if I thought a bit because it’s ‘rational’ and directly contradicting reality is the same as an approximation” schtick?
Ah, I see that I’ve made the mistake of engaging in this conversation in good faith when that was never your intention. I won’t make that mistake with you again.
If air pollution policy was set based on assuming all humans are spherical cows in a vacuum, you might have a coherent point, but when the dominant controlling power in your field is based on the assertion that we should just remove the air to make reality more like the models then your field is a laughing stock.
If I posit for a moment that you actually come from a sub-field interested in describing reality rather than altering reality to suit the wealthy, then you should rename what you do or get rid of the ones giving you a bad name. Clean up your shit or call what you do if you want to be taken seriously. Otherwise you get to be lumped in with the feckless ghouls your field holds up as experts.
It’s like arguing that physics’ fundamental assumptions are wrong because basic physics problems assume that cows are spheres with no air resistance.
As an engineer: I feel attacked. If you can’t approximate things to the point that you can do the math on the back of an envelope then is it really science?
We have a fairly solid understanding of an ideal economy. If the economy was run according to current theory, we’d avoid a lot of issues (and find new ones we would address, of course).
However, the economy is run according to political whims, so most of the economic theory gets thrown out the window. It’s pretty easy to run into major issues when nothing stays consistent for more than a couple years, and the interests of those in charge do not include a stable and sustainable economy.
Yeah I might be making the mistake of thinking that economic policy is made by economic scientists.
We don’t do that with climate, energy, education, or health… So I guess it’s not fair to make the assumption for economic matters either.
I guess like many other areas of social policy (which… I assume we agree economic policy is) it that I’m very… I don’t know… “Aware”, maybe of the limitation of fields driven primarily by study as opposed to more hands on experimental methods.
Yeah, policy is not made by economists. Which is both good and bad! Ideally you don’t want somebody who only looks at their own corner of the world running things, because they’ll end up sacrificing everything else to make that corner look good.
“If reality was the thing we made up, the thing we made up would be science” isn’t a great defense. Neoclassical economics is not science, it’s barely even a semi-coherent fairy tale.
It’s more “if people quit trying to break the system to enrich themselves, and the politicians actually agreed to empower the agencies which are supposed to oversee and regulate large companies and financial institutions, and we actually listened to the data instead of the soundbites that sound good as long as you don’t think about them much, we’d be much better off.”
Economists are not in charge of anything, politicians and rich people are. And they aren’t incentivized to run things like an economist, because then they would make less money.
Just because the people with an incentive to blow up the economy to make money end up blowing up the economy to make more money every few years doesn’t mean economics is at fault for that. It’s like saying climate science isn’t real because earlier projections of global warming were more optimistic, when the real reason is the science was suppressed and downplayed by the people making boatloads of money off fossil fuels.
The correct analogy would be if the climate deniers working for Chevron were held up as field experts, and that the institution of climate science stood behind them, then anyone who pointed it out was just told we need to organise agriculture on more +4.5 degree compatible terms.
Ceteris paribus, or all things equal is a super common economics phrase. It’s basically impossible to maintain in the real world. Economics used to be considered philosophy for a reason. As someone with a economics degree I do pretty much agree with you.
The “hard science” part of it is using past data to build models. You’re still more or less trying to tie the figures into a theory of why they happened that may or may not be true. There are so many factors it’s impossible to know. For instance I truly believe that the stronger anti-monopoly enforcement and higher taxes played a major role in America’s success and the rise of the middle class from post WW2-80s. I have to admit that there are an insane amount of other factors at play here that might invalidate all the trends during the same time though. Every other developed countries info structure being bombed to the ground giving the US a huge start not being the least of which.
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