• 9point6@lemmy.worldEnglish
    34·
    17 天前

    Economics is a funny one as ultimately it’s a focused & technical strand of anthropology (which I believe is considered a science by many) that people often incorrectly lump in with maths.

    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.

    Though I guess even bad experiments are still experiments

    Edit: typo

    • loonsun@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
      12·
      17 天前

      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.

    • AnarchistArtificer@slrpnk.netEnglish
      1·
      17 天前

      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

    • Skullgrid@lemmy.worldEnglish
      1·
      17 天前

      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

  • nonentity@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
    31·
    17 天前

    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.

    • Knock_Knock_Lemmy_In@lemmy.worldEnglish
      1·
      16 天前

      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·
      16 天前

      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).

  • panda_abyss@lemmy.caEnglish
    29·
    17 天前

    Economics brings the spherical cow issue to its logical extreme with “efficient markets”

    • ayyy@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
      9·
      17 天前

      If markets are driven by “rational actors” then why is advertising a trillion dollar industry?

  • Meron35@lemmy.worldEnglish
    17·
    17 天前

    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
      19·
      17 天前

      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.

    • trolololol@lemmy.worldEnglish
      1·
      16 天前

      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.

      • technocrit@lemmy.dbzer0.comEnglish
        5·
        16 天前

        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.

  • zloubida@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
    9·
    17 天前

    I always considered economics, philosophy, theology and law as (important) academic subjects which are not sciences.

      • zloubida@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
        6·
        17 天前

        Indeed. But the sense of these words changed since they were adopted. Originally they just meant “teacher of general studies”.

    • fishos@lemmy.worldEnglish
      1·
      17 天前

      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.

  • massive_bereavement@fedia.io
    8·
    17 天前

    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
      8·
      17 天前

      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
        8·
        17 天前

        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

  • sga@piefed.socialEnglish
    8·
    16 天前

    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).