In our time, the economics profession has undergone tremendous change for the better, and those neoclassical nostrums have been subjected to intense scrutiny by a new generation of economists who have seen with their own two eyes that markets do not always self-correct (another neoclassical assertion) and that sometimes, government intervention is required to achieve good ends.
Republican politicians didn’t get the memo. ** Nor did the American electorate. ** So it’s very easy to tell people, for example, that you’re going to open up federal lands to more drilling, and there’ll be more oil, and prices will go down. That’s about as much economics as your average person remembers from high school, and it makes intuitive sense.
That’s your actual root cause right there.
The heritage foundation.
Since the 70s they have been directing GOP policy.
And the Heritage Foundation, or at least it’s ideology, date back to the earliest days of the union. We fought a civil war over it. But they’re a parasite. They maneuver into every little weakness and multiply.
They’re greedy and don’t give a shit about anything else. That’s it. Their votes are being sold to the highest bidder.
They aren’t dumb, they just don’t give any fucks. All they care about is giving more and more tax breaks to their masters, our billionaie oligarchs. And they say anything regardless of truth, logic, sanity - anything that sounds good in the moment to get power, keep power.
I mean, it’s pretty much everyone. I’m including macroeconomists in there too, the best model they have without some horrific quantifiability problem is only 60% accurate.
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 by the owning class, and applied as their supporting mythology.
It’s entirely imaginary, which means alternatives are only ever a conjuring away.
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What they said is actually totally reasonable. People (particularly economists) treat economics as though it’s a hard science akin to physics or chemistry, but it’s a soft science. They gave David Card a nobel in economics for figuring out a way to actually test hypotheses some of the time. In 2021.
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Give me examples of economists coming up with hypotheses and then building experiments to test them.
The 2008 financial crisis?
The global financial crisis was a huge surprise to most economists and is basically the #1 example of the field not having any predictive power, something you generally want from a hard science.
I mean, that’s an experimental result. It’s not a positive result, but it is a result.
Where’s the flaw in my comment?
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in my experience, Econ education is the study of a single economic system - capitalism. Did they ever discuss alternative socioeconomic systems or simply say ‘state ownership = bad’?
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No not my major - my experience was just econ 101 but I like reading about economics in my free time, and it seemed like econ 101 at my US university should have been called Capitalism 101. My comment was moreso to see if that changes at later stages in the economics-major program.
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Economics is the social control mechanism that filled the void vacated by religion after the enlightenment.
Finance replaced mythology. Banks and financial institutions replaced churches and cathedrals. Economists replaced the clergy. GDP replaced God.
Mathematics is the foundation of reality, accounting is a selective subset of mathematics.
Economics is functionally religion that wears a tattered robe of finance which is patched with parts of accounting that economists find useful to support the doctrine of their particular model.
Like religion, economics can prove useful for a society, but similarly it has no intrinsic legitimacy imposing influence on or over those who don’t willingly and non-coercively subscribe to its narrative.
Except in terms of predictive power it’s just barely more successful than random chance. As a discipline it’s still largely in its most primitive stage, and still full of unproven and largely hypothetical assumptions that amount to little more than idle musings and superstitions. It’s so full of holes it’s just slightly more rigorous than pseudoscience. Perhaps in 100 years it will develop into a more respectable discipline, but at this stage it’s at best a tool for short term modelling and post hoc analysis.
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This isn’t true, though. Economics is a material study of social relations that objectively exist and are reinforced by how we produce and distribute. Bourgeois economics tends towards idealism, turning it from materialism. We cannot simply “conjure” a new system. Systems are material processes, and so we must take a scientific, rather than utopian, approach.
