Economics is about taking political arguments and assigning them to a clergy so that the people can't touch them. Economists relegate politics of the economy to a special class that is easy to control. They serve certain power structures. They obfuscate this power backed decision making with math.
I missed the vizier training classes though. That's unfortunate -- being able to intentionally shape world events would really satisfy the ego. /s
Truth be told, there is a spectrum of political leanings among economists akin to the spectrum of political leanings among developers. We're not a superclass of reptilian ubermensch and uberfrauen able to worm our ways into the minds of the powerful.
Possibly the main missing point is that the book appears to be uninformed that there are many economic scholars researching inequality, race[1], feminism[2], environmentalism[3], and other progressive areas[4].
Really, there is a broad set of things considered "economics" and I encourage folks to check it out[5].
Remember that all models are wrong, but some are useful. The article's mention of Oi's work highlights this, but the book's takeaway is weird. Rather than a justifiable conclusion of "economists are learning the same as the rest of the world how to manage their leaky abstractions" the book instead treats the reader to FUD.
Contrarian is probably referring to the Rasputin like celebrity pundit economists who are funded and promoted by undeclared vested interests. Like the realtors backing Friedman (or was it Hayek?) and those Freakonomics guys.
I'm TOTALLY FINE with lobbying, patronage, sponsorship, and bias. More than fine. If its declared.
But even "serious economists" like you have to admit there's personalities claiming expertise you know they lack. The whole Gell-Mann Amnesia thing. Those times someone on TV spews some nonsense that makes you want to kick a puppy in outrage.
> Remember that all models are wrong, but some are useful.
I can't count the number of times I've heard that trotted out as a tired defense of bad modelling. All models are wrong: some are useful, some are dangerous. Are you sure you can distinguish between those categories?
> Possibly the main missing point is that the book appears to be uninformed that there are many economic scholars researching inequality, race[1], feminism[2], environmentalism[3], and other progressive areas[4].
I don't think either the reviewer or the book itself are claiming that there are no economists that study those causes. It sounds like the book claims that postwar economists have enjoyed unaccountable policy influence, and their methodology has blinded them to certain consequences of their advice.
So what does "appropriate risk assessment" look like? Vary some parameters and add confidence bounds to your outputs?
If you're building an economic model and they economy enters a regime that you haven't seen before in your data, your model calibration is going to crumble. So maybe good models can be distinguished from bad when predicated on the assumption that the near future looks like the past. But when that changes (i.e. when you need your models most) is when your models become least reliable.
It's really not a question of how bad an economic model is, but whether there exists a better one we can use in its place. When people criticize (often rightly) economic models and point out their limitations, there is an implication that we should abandon them because they are so flawed. But this is wrong. It is not enough to avoid flawed models; we need something demonstrably better to replace them with, and this is where the critics tend to come up short.
Suppose we get rid of economists and their models; then what do we use in their place to guide policy? Our intuition? No thanks. If someone has a superior theory of the economy, they must show it with logic and empirical observation. Until they do, we are stuck with our more flawed models.
> Suppose we get rid of economists and their models; then what do we use in their place to guide policy? Our intuition?
Controlled small-scale experiments? Ethnography? Historical analysis? Debate among stakeholders?
Why do decisions have to be justified using mathematical models? Especially when those models have to be simplified to the point where they're really just "stories" (Paul Krugman's words) about economies? Why not just tell the stories in English?
In a number of fields where the object of study is particularly complex - biology and medicine being notable examples - mathematical models are ineffective. What makes you think the economy is different?
Because you can say things in mathematics that are hard to say in English. The stories are clearer when expressed in mathematical form. It's harder to bullshit your way through.
Before the 70s/80s, everyone was somewhat confused about what they were arguing, particularly in macroeconomics. Now it's much clearer the kinds of claims we are making about the world.
I absolutely disagree. As an exercise, try translating a representative agent / rational expectations / DSGE model into English and see how ridiculous it sounds.
Mathematics might force you to be internally consistent, but it also forces you to make bad assumptions. You can prove anything by reasoning from a faulty premise.
Everyone who stays away from writing down a mathematical model is either confused themselves, or trying to confuse their readers. The advantage of a model with a representative agent, or rational expectations, is that I can see the assumption right there. They made it perfectly clear. They didn't try to fool me with a barrage of words. If I think their explanation is wrong because people are irrational, or because the agent heterogeneity is important, I can take their model and show how it falsifies their results.
And one important thing we learned from those models (which I agree do not work) is that we don't get business cycles from irrationality or from agent heterogeneity -- we get them from the failure of markets to clear. Economists were confused about this for like a century, and thanks to mathematical modeling it became clear.
> Everyone who stays away from writing down a mathematical model is either confused themselves, or trying to confuse their readers.
That seems like a profoundly narrow viewpoint to me. I mean maybe you're right in the sense that there might be an equation that governs the evolution of the universe, but are you really saying mathematical models are the only way to approach research?
If so I strongly recommend you do some scientific reading outside of economics and physics. I think most interesting phenomena in the world are too complex to capture in mathematics. Physics is a profound outlier in that regard.
> And one important thing we learned from those models (which I agree do not work) is that we don't get business cycles from irrationality or from agent heterogeneity -- we get them from the failure of markets to clear. Economists were confused about this for like a century, and thanks to mathematical modeling it became clear.
I have done plenty of reading outside of economics and physics, as well as reading in the history of economics. It is clear to me that economics stumbled around in the dark until the mathematical modeling revolution. There are very few interesting phenomena in economics that we can't capture in a model.
Thank you vey much for your comment. I agree with most of your thoughts and learned a lot from it.
Specifically, the FUD part sort of worked on me a bit in retrospect. The book was likely written this way because it gets listened to and sells copies.
That said just because there is a dash of spin doesn't mean it is any less true.
A country implements certain policies and after some time effects are seen. Conclusion? It depends. Do the like economists like the policy, yes or no? Have things gone well or bad?
1. No. Bad. Things went bad because country did not do as economists said.
2. Yes. Bad. Things went bad because country did not deal with past policies that economists don't like.
3. No. Good. Things went well because of past policies economists do like.
4. No. Bad. Things went bad because country did not listen to the economists.
Economists are always right. There's always enough of the ideal and the non ideal going on to establish the desired causality, and negligible chance of exact recurrence.
I only take economists seriously when they talk densely and fluently about history and its complexities. I recommend Mark Blyth.
> Economists are always right. There's always enough of the ideal and the non ideal going on to establish the desired causality, and negligible chance of exact recurrence.
Type 2 chaotic system. Economists never know wtf they are talking about. They are speaking about history. You can not make conclusions from history. The more dense your non-sense, the easier it is to bullshit. You have a pool of economists, you are a rich person or you are a political party that subscribes to certain political myths. From the pool you find the guy that says what you want to hear, they become your champion. The news papers that support you start talking about them. The universities that they grew from receive more funding from you, where you have various schools. You start talking about their theories and how they make perfect sense. You use that to push your political objectives and get policies passed. Things get fucked. Those policies fall out of favour, but not before making millions if not billions for certain people who pushed those. Wait a decade, find a new economist, rinse and repeat.
I have no idea how to argue against this nonsense.
Basically, these are the same anti-scientific arguments that climate sceptics put forward against climate science or anti-vaxers against medicine. One simply claims that a science is in reality a religion and that it serves only to support unpopular policies such as tax increases, interest rate cuts or to increase the profits of the pharmaceutical industry.
Like a lot of things, the truth is in the middle, and for awhile the pendulum has swung in the direction of certified experts. The problem with this societal paradigm is that experts are often wrong, there's fads, and corruption. Responses to criticism that label the critics uninformed, unscientific, or defective (eg paranoid) are essentially ad hominem. A system like this will inevitably fail because the experts are shielded from responsibility, when if anything they should be expected to be able to tolerate greater criticism.
This problem cuts across many areas at the moment. Economics isn't the only thing.
I don't think the pendulum swung too much towards the experts. Just a few weeks ago, there was an article here on Hacker News (I can't find it at the moment), according to which climate scientists and climate change deniers get almost the same coverage in American news articles and I don't think this is a topic where the truth is in the middle.
I don't think the truth is always in the middle but it often is. Climate change is an interesting example; maybe too much to say via mobile but I'd argue that even though the evidence for climate change is pretty clear, climate scientists have underplayed their errors at times and the wide level of uncertainty involved. The recent retraction is a good example. I think this kind of attitude backfired, by making the blindspots that much more vulnerable. See, for example, recent discussions here about reforestation efforts using non-native monoculture, which could be seen as a similar dynamic to the experts-knows-best problem. I'm not saying reforestation is bad, only that it is another example of experts having biases going unnoticed.
Also, it could be argued that the climate change problem is really a socioeconomic one. I wouldn't say this has been neglected, but berating consumers and producers for what is more of a systemic problem isn't the most helpful thing.
Lots of critics are uninformed, unscientific, and defective. the world is full of people who make confident pronouncements about the field of economics that are ill-informed. (It's actually a bit mysterious to me why that is.)
I feel the same way about OP's article. I'm not sure what it's trying to get at. The example it keeps going back to is Nixon getting rid of the draft by using an argument made by an economist to justify it. The author lambasts Nixon for using an economic (i.e. data-based) argument rather than a feelings-based argument ("one that weighed national security, military readiness, and democratic control").
But then later the author rails against how economists are too beholden to their own "bias" and "political" beliefs. So which is it? Are we to utilize evidence to help justify our decisions, or should we base our policy decisions off of our gut? It sounds like the author prefers that we defer our social policy decisions to philosophers, a profession even less beholden to hard evidence to back their conclusions. But bias and political beliefs are simply an extension of personal philosophy, so... you would just end up right back where we started trying to reduce personal preference leaking into hard facts and poisoning the problem-solving process.
It's one thing to say that we shouldn't elevate scientific findings and theories (and in turn their founders) to dogmatic levels. Science is a technique to offer answers to problems; nothing more. The technique and its findings can be incorrect or misused or simply misunderstood, but I don't see how the alternatives proposed are any better. Yes, it would be nice if we (and by extension, our elected officials) could have come to the conclusion about the ill effects of the draft based on an argument like "it's bad to force people to go to war for a cause they might not believe in", but that is an open-ended philosophical question and is why we have a democratic process in the first place. We all get a say in what our values are and how our public policy aligns with those values.
I feel like the author does exactly what he argues against: hand-picks a number of data points (very loose ones in this case), packages them up into some kind of position that backs his worldview that things are not going the way he would prefer, and then uses that to argue a deeper philosophical point rather than just get at the concept that scientific findings can often be abused (maybe because that is a much harder problem to solve than just saying economists suck).
Don't even get me started on the fact that the author refers to economists as "privileged" and infers that they are a social class which "came to enter policymaking and insinuate themselves into the governing class". As if people in the field of economics are just born into this powerful bubble in society and should shut their mouths because they simply got lucky in life; not that many of them worked hard to get in to their current profession.
Well go read the book and argue against that, that's good enough for me. Economics is not a science, economics uses science. The alternative to economics is politics where political decisions like austerity are not wrapped up in economics and pushed hook line and sinker. Where you are have to argue for policies politically rather than just pushing them because leading economist nobel prize winner said so.
> Economics is not a science, economics uses science.
So you decide what is science and what isn't? What is your model of what a science is? As long as you can't answer that, the only thing unscientific is your comment.
> The alternative to economics is politics where political decisions like austerity are not wrapped up in economics and pushed hook line and sinker.
You can use any science to wrap up political decisions. Also, economics is not a normative science like philosophy. Everything economics does is to say: "According to model M, if you do X in situation Y, then Z happens". If politicians turn it into austerity measures or deficit spending, then that' s politics, not economics.
> because leading economist nobel prize winner said so.
Economics is definitely not a science. It is a social science -- it can use the methodological tools of science to investigate and support theories applied in situations where the whole may behave predictably but individuals typically won't.
We certainly test hypotheses, strategize, and theorize. But, contrary to physics or biology, there probably will never be a set of iron-clad rules and facts that can be derived.
When I went through graduate school, the elephant in the room was "where did preferences come from?" Preferences are used as the basis of analysis in microeconomics, and macroeconomics tries to base itself on top of micro. The answers of the day were unsatisfying -- neuroscience has made great strides, but we still only see the observation without knowing the underlying system itself.
I think a good litmus test for whether a field of study should be classfied as philosophy or science, is whether or not experts within the field are able to achieve consensus. For economics being a strict science, there are a shocking number of experts who can't agree on the laws of economics.
Why is agreement a measure of how scientific a field is?
I would argue that if there are no conflicting views, no progress can be made. I would also argue that the older a science is, the more consensus there will be for fundamental things, and since economics is a rather new science, there are fewer things economists can agree on.
Isaac Newton's Principia was first published in English in 1728. Adam Smith published The Wealth of Nations in 1776. That's a 48 year head start out of the nearly 250 years we have had both physics and economics.
Economics as a serious empirical science is a post-World War 2 phenomenon. Ptolemy had better data about the planets in the second century than we had about the economy in the early twentieth century.
> So you decide what is science and what isn't? What is your model of what a science is? As long as you can't answer that, the only thing unscientific is your comment.
1. a branch of knowledge or study dealing with a body of facts or truths systematically arranged and showing the operation of general laws: the mathematical sciences.
Please list a set of economic truths. Any set will be good enough as long as it can make reliable predictions that can be tested in the real world.
> You can use any science to wrap up political decisions.
You could, but the point is not to. Or if you want to then make sure that the science is predictive.
> Be more specific. Who said what?
When you are talking about the general facts that economics is often prescriptive but at the same time can be shown to be unpredictive which proves that it is not fit for this task. Yet economists and their political allies continue to argue that it is. Maybe it's better than simply political arguments and maybe the justification for supporting the orthodoxy is in line with that. That you're scared of the political outcome and so economics is a safer option.
The physicist can drop a stone with a certain mass from a tower of a particular height and can predict that the next time she drops that rock from that tower, it will take the same amount of time to hit the ground.
Social science, which is most definitely science, must deal with the additional complexity of dealing with weird, quirky, fickle human beings. In a real sense, you and I are not the same people we were yesterday. Rocks and towers are much less interesting from that perspective.
Some physical or hard sciences, even without people, are lousy at predicting. Meteorology is a science, and there’s a reason for the old saw that the weather man is never right. What meteorology and social sciences have in common is they study complex dynamic systems where knowing the state of the entire system at any given time is difficult or even impossible and seemingly insignificant differences in precision can produce entirely different predictions.
Sometimes it is not the scale of complexity that makes a problem tough to tackle. I believe we agree that mathematics is a science, and I’ll make the modest claim that theoretical computer science is a branch of mathematics. We cannot predict in general whether an arbitrary Turing machine given a certain input will halt or run forever. Nevermind the simple question of whether a computer program will eventually terminate: Rice’s theorem tells us that in general we cannot predict whether an arbitrary program has any interesting property.
Economics is not a mathematical science, it has no underlying axioms like mathematics. Neither does biology, medicine or climate science. Do you think these are not sciences either?
> When you are talking about the general facts that economics is often prescriptive...
That's wrong, economics isn't prescriptive, maybe that's your basic misunderstanding. Economics is a positive science, just like biology or climate science, it doesn't tell you what to do, it just tries to understand 'if this, then that'.
