• nonentity@sh.itjust.works
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    4 hours ago

    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.

      • grte@lemmy.ca
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        4 hours ago

        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.

        • TheReanuKeeves@lemmy.world
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          4 hours ago

          Econ is math explaining how anything affects markets, it uses actual logic to explain changes. Give me some examples of how theology uses math to explain anything

          • grte@lemmy.ca
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            4 hours ago

            Give me examples of economists coming up with hypotheses and then building experiments to test them.

              • grte@lemmy.ca
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                1 hour ago

                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.

                  • grte@lemmy.ca
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                    45 minutes ago

                    Sure. I guess this falls under ‘natural experiments’ which is what David Card got his nobel for, figuring out how to test hypotheses some of the time. Now try and do peer review on that result.

        • TheReanuKeeves@lemmy.world
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          4 hours ago

          I went to uni for business admin with a concentration in finance and I disagree with all of it.

          Econ is a social science that studies the effects decisions have on a market, it uses math to explain it. Econ is not the cause, econ is the study of.

          Finance is not an arbitrary subset of mathematics. It’s calculus, derivatives, and polynomial models that predict and explain.

          You may as well call math and logic imaginary

          • 🇨🇦GreenBeard🇨🇦@lemmy.ca
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            1 hour ago

            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.

          • brendansimms@lemmy.world
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            2 hours ago

            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’?

    • Cowbee [he/they]@lemmy.ml
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      4 hours ago

      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.