Well, apparently a “good” economy destroy the planet, kills workers and don’t provide anymore healthcare. In fact, healthcare is detrimental to a good economy apparently, it liberals wouldn’t be so hard on destroying healthcare everywhere?
There is nothing which inherently says an economy has to be environmentally bad, indeed there are many examples of economic success on the back of renewable power.
I'd agree in too many cases an environmentally bad policy is persued with economic measures being given as a justification, but that is just bad policy.
A good economy can invest green, a bad economy is a collection of of people just trying to make ends meet - the environment will never benefit from this, environmentally distructive options are usually cheaper than their greener alternatives.
What do you think the economy is?
I would argue Iceland has a very good economy, yet it is world leading in renewable power and has minimal inequality.
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™.
Funny enough, this is a really underrated comment @snooggums
It's like most of the weather forecasters predicting the weather by watching other weather forecasters
And people making bets on cyclones and hurricanes
And if you get enough weather forecasters to agree it will rain, then it will rain.
With people cheering for sunny skies and rain clouds, and then arguing over breaks in the clouds vs gathering storms
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.
Economists are there to perform the job that Theology departments used to do: provide a mystical moral justification of whatever the assholes in charge want to do to everybody else.
It’s possible to do that in Economics, but most of them are very unethical. It’s not impossible.
For example, you would have to have complete control over an economy to make experimental changes. Say increasing interest rates just for certain subjects and leaving them alone for the control group. It would be very illegal.
Usually economists take advantage of local law changes to observe the results. Like you can look at the effects of increasing minimum wage on unemployment by looking at cities that do it before and after. Or you can compare similar states that when some of them pass a law, but others don’t.
The movie “Trading Places” is a kind of unethical economic experiment, although the record keeping was sparse.
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.
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).
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.
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).
This sentence doesn't even make sense.
Econometrics is highly research driven and evidence based. In it's simplest form econometrics says if you put prices down you will (usually) sell more of your product. You'd dismiss this observation as pseudo-science?
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.
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