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.
The heritage foundation.
Since the 70s they have been directing GOP policy.
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.
They’re greedy and don’t give a shit about anything else. That’s it. Their votes are being sold to the highest bidder.
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.
Brother, you are high as a kite
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.
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
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?
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
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.
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’?
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.
