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I personally think the biggest flaw of economics is how it takes “people are rational actors” as an axiom.
The fact that so many people can be convinced to vote against their economic best interests by supporting the GOP shows how fallacious that axiom is.
I’ve also seen that economists never account for naked greed.
economics is how it takes “people are rational actors” as an axiom
It doesn’t, though. Maybe it’s assumed in models for simplification. Other sciences assume ideal conditions (eg, frictionless media, conservative forces, quasistatic processes in introductory physics) for simplification.
Behavioral economists have won Nobel prizes for studying departures from actor rationality. They’re aware perfect rationality is a simplification.
This post is specifically speaking to the cases where they use simplified models to inform policy. Not all economists are stupid and it is good that the field is improving on its weathered past. But the “science” which is taught to justify oppression, that’s still also real propaganda that is being pushed. See i.e. the Laffer curve.
See i.e. the Laffer curve.
That’s a bit reductive, too. I recall economists arguing the Laffer curve is valid & the US is on the low tax-rate side of the optimal tax rate, and that was decades ago. They’ll show the deadweight loss of taxes & also point out its regulatory uses to correct market failures.
It’s also not a recent development. The field is broad and includes leftists & Marxists applying the same methods to study different problems.
When you get to the informing policy stage, much “harder” sciences like pharmacology also get the same treatment of using completely disproven crap to inform drug policy. If you look hard enough, you can almost always find a study that agrees with your wildest biases and a PhD (often even in “good standing”) who stands behind it and agrees with you.
That there are 500 papers that find the exact opposite of your conclusion is not much of an issue when you’re acting in bad faith and have a friendly media outlet to voice your views
Yeah, but if you start getting into the irrationality of actors, you are all the sudden studying group psychology or sociology rather than economics.
Although I have always wanted to combine network theory with economics/finance understanding…
Doesn’t it also assume consumers have perfect information to make their choices in a market?
How informative is the advertising industry?
Literally in page one of econ textbooks they will say “a common exception to the rational actor theory is like when people need emergency medical services.” AND THEN they just ignore that GLARING caveat for the rest lf the book. Snake oil.
I love the implication that a “rational actor” would choose death over losing money
hi guyes im disabled and have cancer checks bank account awe sheit well that has been a good life can’t afford this no more😊 ta ta all
You lose money every day paying for living expenses.
Let’s make deal!
Another exception is how sometimes increasing prices will increase sales rather than the other way around.
Also a lot of the time, a discount will get more attention than the price itself. Like $1000 with a 60% markdown ($400 final) might sell more than the same thing at $350 with 0% markdown.
The Udemy system
yessir! veblen goods https://www.investopedia.com/terms/v/veblen-good.asp
economics is not a science, it’s not even a humanity; it’s an inhumanity.
Economics is a science, at least in theory, but it’s a science that’s being practiced very badly.
The core issue is that pretty much the entire field has decided, collectively, that there is absolutely no requirement to test their assumptions against reality. Basically economists will build a model that reflects a vision of reality that seems to make sense to them, and then build a whole set of assertions supported by that model.
When economists (most often ones who would describe themselves as progressive economists) actually do test the models against observable reality, most of them come crashing down. Good economic science instead says “What does reality tell us, and how can be we build models that explain it?”
There are good economists out there. The youtube channel Unlearning Economics is a fantastic starting point, as is this lecture series from McMaster University; https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLzLUWMt2NZLRmKY_kEiLc-hvOcyOlgE4N. I also suggest looking into David Graebar, Cristobal Young, and Mark Blyth.
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i almost believe there has to be like a reckoning in economics, kind of like with psychology and the backlash against freud. far too many of the assumptions are taken for granted as fact despite haveing no data to back them (like the laffer curve, really?). they just get propogated because rich white men said stuff that benefits them.
like there is definitely some truth to glean in economics. but as it stands, it’s a disservice to call it a science.
Nobody ever looked at the laffer curve and went “huh, so we cut taxes for the rich, and tax revenue went down, that means we should raise taxes for the rich.”
We just didn’t cut taxes enough!!!1!! Keep cutting taxes for the rich and someday we’ll ALL be rich!!
But the laffer curve indicates that if we cut taxes a little and that lowers revenue, cutting them even more would be much worse??
The Laffer curve represents the premise that high taxes repress the economy and lower total revenue as badly as extremely low taxes would and that there is a sweet spot on the curve where the tax rate isn’t too high or too low which maximizes total revenue. Conservatives always claim that the tax rates are above that point and that we just need to keep lowering tax rates on the rich to spur the economy and thus boost revenue.
They don’t know where that sweet spot is but they are just sure that we are above it and we just need to keep cutting. In summary, they are idiots who just want to make rich people richer.
Yes, that was my point, that if they actually believed in that model, they would support raising taxes because every time we cut taxes, revenue decreases.
It’s been a long time since my college econ classes, but I remember the flaw with Laffer’s curve wasn’t so much that it exists as it was his assumption that we’re on the right side of the curve instead of the left.
As far as I can remember, even if Laffer was correct about his theory (and that’s a hell of an if) no one has been able to demonstrably prove the point where cutting taxes increases federal revenue. It’s pretty obvious at this point the whole theory is just a post hoc rationale for cutting taxes.
like there is definitely some truth to glean in economics. but as it stands, it’s a disservice to call it a science.
absolutely, my statement was real edgelordy, but the idea behind economics, that is to say “resource management” is a valuable field of study, but as you say, it’s all been manipulated shit to make the rich richer.
well expressed!
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that it’s based on the scientific method, and there’s repeatable experiments/steps to take with proven and proveable outcomes.
“Trickle down economics” is a fucking lie, yet we have zillions of (economic) liberals.
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great , now make it have an impact on people’s lives that matters.
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It’s a “science” manufactured to justify neoliberalism and a failing global capitalist system.
I’m a STEM person, so I thought I’d take an economics class in college and it’s all basically voodoo. The textbook contradicted itself all the time and the reasoning was full of fallacies. Do not recommend.
I swear I hate how economics is misusing math and graphs in particular
i swear! pick up the average econ 101 textbook and it’s just pro-capitalist propaganda. and not like veiled either—freshmen in college are getting told “here’s why minimum wages never work” while at the same time getting told “but corporate bailouts are just natural and nothing we can do to stop them”—and no real analysis, just propaganda.
all using what is essentially the mathematics version of a rabbit in a hat with hyper-simplified graphs and algorithms that “prove” their point flat earther style.
i swear! pick up the average econ 101 textbook and it’s just pro-capitalist propaganda. and not like veiled either—freshmen in college are getting told “here’s why minimum wages never work” while at the same time getting told “but corporate bailouts are just natural and nothing we can do to stop them”—and no real analysis, just propaganda.
Have you ever actually taken a 100-level econ course?
i have! and above. thank you for asking, best-faith person on the internet. blocking you for another month for my peace lmao
i have!
If your professor passed you, they should be ashamed of themselves, then.
Minimum wages aren’t necessarily a thing you must have, provided unions are strong in the labour market. We don’t have a legally mandated minimum wage here in Sweden, but it only works because CLAs are so common and the unions are constantly working on it. If people start slacking and stop actively working within unions, or the capitalist asswipes keep trying to undermine the Swedish labour market model, that shit’s going to fall apart quickly.
Musk and his garbage car company for example is one of the most recent occurrences of a company trying its best to undermine the Swedish model. There’s a strike that’s been going on since 2023 because of it. The strategy is essentially just enshittification; offer good terms and wages until the unions are weakened, then throw it all out, run over your workers and there’ll be no recourse since the unions are gone.
I think the only argument against legally mandated minimum wages that I’ve heard that I personally think hold water is that politicians are notoriously slow at changing things so you might end up with a minimum wage that remains the same for 20-30 years. That said, I feel like that’s easily solved if you have an institution that is assigned to keep track of the general expenses a person has on a year to year basis, and base a minimum wage on that. That’s not to say I think minimum wage should be subsistence minimum, it should meet and exceed that, because the stress that comes with living on subsistence minimum isn’t sustainable.
Having previously worked at a company without a CLA I can safely say I’ll never do that again. Sure it was a lovely place to work at, but having the same salary several years in a row really sucked. At my current company we get the union negotiated yearly increases, plus potential bonuses if you meet (or exceed) your development goals.
based
Economics is a classic form of divination, like astrology or tarot, and its purpose is the same - to provide oracles who will serve the monarch and tell him that the things he wants will happen and the things he doesn’t will not.
Economics is best understood as a priesthood, similar in purpose to haruspicy. Once you make that mental adjustment, everything they do, the types of employment they get, the vile drippings they emit, it all makes horrible, horrible sense.
Economists are the priests of capitalism.
I have examined the
goat entrailsquarterly metrics and determined thatgodsmarkets require morehuman sacrificescorporate tax breaks
Economics is a historically flawed and ideological science. But I think it’s getting better and more empirical with time. The scientific method works, economists just have the come down from their high horses and actually follow the data.
That’s easy to say when your mortgage doesn’t depend on the Emperor’s New Clothes being real. Many if not most economists have staked their reputations and networks on pre-empiricism economics.
It’s not a simple matter of “whoops I was wrong about one thing”. Since the 1970s we’ve turned the world economy upside-down to cater to billionaires and inequality has skyrocketed. It would be like a priest admitting he reassigned molesters for decades.
OK but you can’t treat economists as a monolith. If you want to shame the people who did that then go ahead, but I think there’s a newer group of economists who are deconstructing the propaganda and seeking truth, and they should be encouraged.
based. and it’s a weird situation because economists deal with money and money corrupts so there are fallible incentives. just see how trump awarded arthur laffer for his negligible contribution just because his model was convenient for rich people: https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/trump-to-award-presidential-medal-of-freedom-to-economist-art-laffer-today/2019/06/19/f1505826-9299-11e9-aadb-74e6b2b46f6a_story.html
ok I checked the comments on this because I thought we were gonna start analysing the actual stuff in the graphs or something and now everyone’s yapping about how economists are all evil or something
this is gonna get mass downvoted and I don’t care
Come on! Get with it! Dogma over debate! Why aren’t you letting yourself be whipped into a blind frenzy?
You don’t see the clusterfuck of a graph on the right?
The analysis is that there’s is no correlation. It’s an excuse for economists to push whatever is best for their self interests. You saw the analysis and didn’t like it. If you see something different, please share. You’re part of “the comments”.
The graph on the right only shows that more variables impact unemployment than just interest rates alone, which you obviously know. It doesn’t prove or disprove the model on the left, which is a pretty simplified relationship. Monetary policy, like adjusting interest rates, was demonstrated to be quite effective just recently with the Fed successfully keeping inflation and employment under control with these tools over the past few years.
hmm i value your perspective—i think you’re just outside the popular narrative and that’s alright.
no one here believes economists are evil per se. what i and others are expressing with that language is that economists have been employed to justify oppression through malicious misuse of their perceived authority. some have been active bad actors, while many more are just pawns or unwitting mouthpieces for the funneling of wealth into the top 0.1%
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Also the Phillips curve is a two variable snapshot from a multi variate world (iow a simplification so freshmen can understand). The right hand graph is clearly not holding the other non graphed variables constant, hence you don’t get anything useful.
Economics as taught below PhD level is about simplifying down concepts to make a complex system understandable.
Phillips curve says that as unemployment gets worse the ability of suppliers to raise prices gets weaker because consumers have less money.
Of course consumer demand is only one facet of inflation, there’s a whole system of variables there.
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There is more to economics than Milton Friedman. Marx was a pioneer in economics and leftest theory has been robust in the field from the beginning.
Criticizing soft sciences for their estrangement from mathematics is classic antiintellectualism. The same logic would demand the disillusion of psychology, sociology, and all the critical theories that are the foundation of modern leftest thought.
You miss the point that the soft sciences are being used as an excuse for bad policy. If the soft sciences informed a model for good policy this post wouldn’t exist but instead we have the Laffer curve and trickle down economics.
No one here is calling for a disillusion of economics. It just needs to be used appropriately instead of as a voodoo magic to transfer wealth upwards.
Only tangentially related, but it’s often accepted that there is no Nobel prize in economics. There is a Nobel memorial prize in economics (link), but as it was set up after Noble’s death it is in a slightly different category.
Going off what I recall from econ 101 decades ago, the graph on the right violates ceteris paribus: it looks like a historical plot of inflation rate with unemployment rate. Looks like a strawman.
Other sciences would also be unsurprised their models don’t model longitudinal observations that fail to control other variables over time.
Nope you are misreading the situation. Both graphs show the inflation rate with unemployment rate, aka https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phillips_curve.
If the charts were of different data axes it would be a different story but my understanding is this is not a strawman. But I don’t blame your investigation—there’s a lot of money out there trying to convince us that economics is simple actually.
The graph on the left demonstrates how employment rate influences inflation (and vice versa). The graph on the right is a historical account of inflation and unemployment in the US, which is not the same thing.
The graph on the right is subject to a lot more variables. The one on the left is also a simplified model. It’s not really one to one.
ah. it seems like you are getting the point 100% while maintaining that we disagree for some reason. :) im 100% with you and ill leave it at that
Nope you are misreading the situation. Both graphs show the inflation rate with unemployment rate,
Don’t believe I am, and I wrote the same. Please read it carefully.
If the charts were of different data axes
Didn’t suggest this either.
The plot on the right states in US, 1970s onward, ie, different points in time. Sure, inflation rate & unemployment rate changed in the US over time. Do you know what else changed in the US over time? Absolutely anything.
Scientific prediction requires control: it cannot make accurate predictions when relevant variables are left uncontrolled. Take for instance the ideal gas law. When temperature is constant, we can reasonably predict volume & pressure to vary inversely for ideal gases. If temperature is at least known, then we can still make a prediction (a function of temperature). However, if temperature is uncontrolled, no prediction is possible. Models only fit the conditions they’re designed to model.
As mentioned before, economic models typically expect ceteris paribus (all other relevant variables held constant). The article you linked states the Phillips curve models economy only in the short-run. The US economy over a span of years doesn’t satisfy any of those conditions. Therefore, the model doesn’t apply.
Attempting to refute a model by applying it to situations it doesn’t claim to model is a strawman.
ah there’s your confusion. i am not and no one here is refuting the model. we are criticizing how that simplified model is abused without considering the other variables and applied to policy-making. does that make sense?
i think we agree, if the above reframes the post for you :)
we are criticizing how that simplified model is abused without considering the other variables and applied to policy-making. does that make sense?
That indeed makes more sense: it only fits short-run predictions. It justifies short-run policies.
Longer term policies need a different justification: you’re definitely right there.
I think economists have a name for mistaking short- & long-run effects (something to do with equilibrium), but the course was too long ago for me to recall.
The real question is why we even bother discussing a curve which was pulled out of the ass of a man who went on to invent a hydralic computer to model the national economy of the United Kingdom. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phillips_Machine
I think his greatest achievement was to demonstrate the concept of being a really clever idiot.
Economics is a subset of moral philosophy, which just happens to care a lot about mathematics but is (or should be) nonetheless primarily concerned with questions of morality.
A lot of macroeconomics in particular seems to follow aristotlian thinking, i.e. you can just logic your way from step to step. It is interesting in that pure mathematics does work this way in that you can start with a bunch of axioms/definitions and combine them and work with them until you reach a conclusion without any need for experimentation. For example, you don’t need to measure a bunch of triangles to show that the Pythagorean theorem is true.
The way i was taught macroeconomics in school, it takes the mathematical approach of starting with a list of assumptions that seem to be true, and using mathematical logic to derive conclusions. The trouble is that: 1) many starting assumptions aren’t as true as you’d think, and 2) many of the “logical” steps also aren’t as logical as you’d think.
Supply and demand is an easy example. The classic idea is that as supply goes up, price goes down, and vice versa, while as price goes up, demand goes down. The existence of Veblen goods (i.e., things that people want because they are expensive) shows that the demand part isn’t right.
None of this would be a problem if it was just an intellectual exercise to help develop hypotheses for use with more sound scientific methods, but it’s used for policy directly.
Economists refuse to accept that their subject is really just sociology. They like to imagine it being like physics, where study of reality leads to underlying mathematical truths to extrapolate from. Not a big messy subject where you can’t be certain of anything.
What makes it even more freaky is that many of the subjects being studied know they are playing a game. So in many ways economy is more like the evolving metagame of competitive sports, where hardcore nerds constantly try to game the system and outplay each other, and what was a solid strategy last month doesn’t work anymore, even if the rules are the same.
“Econ 101” is just that and if you think it’s representative of “economists” you’re dunning-krugering.
There are a lot of very competent interdisciplinary socio-economic scientists. The problem is that no-one listens to them because everyone still has the hots for the ghost of fucking Milton Friedman and trickle-down raeganomics.
Populist ideologues will always promote simple economic models, that’s not the economists’ fault. Sociologists can tell you why bad economic policy is self-sustaining under democratic capitalism but they can’t really do anything about it because no one asks for their opinion.
Hell, right now the US is ruled by a moron whose understanding of economics is so bad that even the most hard-line libertarian economists are saying “you wot m8”.
Yeah, I think the problem is that the Chicago School is to economics what Freud is to psychology. Despite a century of progress since Freud, pop psych is still all based on him. The difference is that those in charge of policy don’t derive any benefit from applying Freud to mental health policy the way that they might derive a benefit from applying Friedman to economic policy.
When learning about options and future markets, one of the axioms is that no indivial have the power to move the move the market on any direction. But that’s just bullshit when people with enough money and power like Buffet, Elon or Trump can play the market and fuck up all your fancy mathematics.
Beautifully expressed translation of this meme, thank you!
Well tbf we cant make a replica of a national economy in lab and run experiments on it. We only have mathematical models
No, but you can examine historical conditions with largely similar situations aside from the variable you’re studying. And you can do more limited experiments without emulating a national economy.
You can also look at “artificial” economies in games like EVE Online; I seem to recall a few economics papers coming from behavior seen there.
Yeah i try to do when explaining anything aboit economics to people. No one beloves that because it happen elsewhere is would happen here. Even something simple as lower inflation by rising interest rates.
One would think this limitation would give economists some humility when finding conflict with other fields, but it seems quite the opposite.
Anti-intellectualism on Lemmy, it must be a day ending in y.
Calling well-earned criticism of economics anti-intellectualism is using the composition/division fallacy.
Most people’s lives have been affected for decades by Chicago School of Economics voodoo nonsense, that’s where much modern criticism is aimed.
• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Growth_in_a_Time_of_Debt
• https://www.theguardian.com/news/2017/jul/11/how-economics-became-a-religion
And Jesus fucking Christ, the number of people in here who speak like economics is a field united behind Austrian economics is fucking bizarre.
