First you would have to find someone who thought economics were closer to physics.
No, at least someone who graduated kindergarden.
Theres an interesting book on it, literally “Physics of wall street”. Or that was the literal name translated from my language. It explored the similarities between the two, can recommend.
Thanks, looks like an interesting book. Looks like he also wrote on misinformation.
Stop using this abusive, fascist sycophant as a meme template.
Damn right. Fuck Crowder. Abusive spouse, sexually abusive co-worker.
Never even knew the original. What was it?
Steven Crowder
is this a controversial opinion? i think pretty much every economist would tell you it’s a social science
I think the internet thinks economics is a hard science. I think it’s mostly due to the math involved.
It isn’t a difficult science from a learner’s PoV.
It is, however, difficult in a sense of trying to figure out why in the world what happened happened, and most importantly, making it possible to do again.
That’s because not only can you not experiment, you only gather data from observations, but once you share the product of your studies the reality changes in reacton to it.
In same Physics the object of your studies doesn’t simultaniously study you.
Math gets involved to get a result that is somewhat reproducable. But even then since we can’t factor everything we use degrees of probability/certainty.
Theoretically speaking if we managed to fully understand human behaviour then we coult predict the outcome of everything. As you can imagine, we’re nowhere close to being able to do that.
Back to original post, yes, economics is closer to psychology than it is to physics. At least for the fact that we study human behaviour, but on a different scale. So sociology and political science are the closest, then psychology, next all of biological sciences, and chemistry, physics and everything related come last pretty much.
Math doesn’t fit anywhere here, since it’s a tool for measuring reality and not a study of reality itself.
You literally need a doctor’s in mathematics to be an actual economist.
Doctors of Mathematics know enough about modelling and the Garbage-in-Garbage-Out effect that they would quit the discipline of Economics within a few days of entering it.
In the areas were Economics deals with things with high Political Relevance you need the a salesman mindset - vague and self-decieving - which is almost the diametrical opposite of how Matematicians think.
Lmao what? Economists are dorks man, not salespeople. Do you actually know any economists or is this just an “I’m mad because economists don’t push communism” kind of thing
I worked a decade in Investment Banking.
This wall of text only means that economy is not even a science like psychology or social sciences could be.
Economy is a fraud.
Lmao “economists don’t like my economic views so economics isn’t real”
Economics is the hardest social science, because it uses the most math.
It’s somewhere between physics and sociology.
That doesn’t make any sense. Anything involving math is relatively easy because there’s only one right answer. A lot of people have this backwards because they have shitty math education and seem to think higher maths are akin to some kind of alchemy.
Hard science as in “has a right answer”, as opposed to a soft science that is more subjective.
I’m not referring to difficulty.
Great. I’m not referring to your ideas. I’m referring to popular understanding.
There is no math involved in economics. Every equation in the field is a definition.
No one who has even the faintest idea of what physics is would be able to conflate it with economics. About the only way the two are related is that they’re both studied by people to the point that you can get a degree that focuses on either.
I think you would be surprised how much math used in physics is used in economics and then there is statistics which is heavily used in both.
Meh, math and statistics are (ab)used pretty much anywhere in science. Carpenters and blacksmiths both use hammers, but so do roofers and geologists.
There is a specific area of economics that deals with psychology: behavioral economics.
Also, can we retire using Steven Crowder, who abused his wife for years, as a meme?
My mind did tricks with that last comma , “You know, that funny meme where he abused his wife”
Maybe he did abuse her as a meme, we don’t know his motives
At least psychology is mostly experimental, whereas economics isn’t. I’d say economics is closer to sociology.
And even psychology is extremely dubious. Just look at the recent Stanford scandal, and the replication crisis a few year ago…
Unfortunately, publication pressure turned psychology into total junk. You can’t really believe anything unless several other institutions replicated the experiments (and good luck getting funding for that).
You can’t really believe anything unless several other institutions replicated the experiments (and good luck getting funding for that.)
Shouldn’t that be the case with every scientific discipline?
I agree.
Economics, sociology and political science are the trifecta of sciences that cover human societies, rather than human individuals.
Psychology is closer to medicine. It is complex and unpredictable, because humans are complex and unpredictable, but they approach the subject empirically and can actually achieve consistentcy. For example, we are getting really good at helping people with PTSS, ADHD, Autism, learning difficulties, etc.
I would say economics, sociology and political science are at the lowest rung on the “certainty” totempole. These sciences are forever stuck in the “we don’t know what we don’t know, so we are driving blind” mode of operation. They only succeed in analysing and narrating what happened after the fact. At best, they prevent us from repeating some mistakes in the most obvious ways. But they also enable us to repeat old mistakes in novel ways.
The only reason people confuse economics with the hard sciences, is because it has a Nobel prize.
But it really should be seen as an equivalent to the Nobel peace and literature prizes, in a separate league of the physics, medicine and chemistry ones.
Even economists themselves call their science the dismal science.
All this said, Economists are true and capable scientists (well, some are corrupt and biased, but some doctors are, too. That’s not an indictment of the whole field).
Their subject is just difficult to analyze.
I mean, define experimental?
Daniel Kahneman won the 2002 Nobel prize in economics for his research on the psychology of judgement and decision making, which drives our economic models. He’s a psychologist.
Any definition of experimental that fits psychology will fit economics.
Psychology is “experimental” only in its loosest possible definition.
Wrong
Sociology is an actual science with a methodology and it tries to learn from other sciences.
Economy considers it pure like maths despite the evidences it is not the case.
Economy is pseudo-science at its best.
Economy` is pseudo-science at its best.
This sentence doesn’t even make sense.
Econometrics is highly research driven and evidence based. In it’s simplest form econometrics says if you put prices down you will (usually) sell more of your product. You’d dismiss this observation as pseudo-science?
That’s dubious. Considering that economists deliberately ignore strong established psychological theories to make theirs work. Economical theory also runs contrary to a lot of established notions of sociology. Economics is closer to politics than to any science.
Economists are there to perform the job that Theology departments used to do: provide a mystical moral justification of whatever the assholes in charge want to do to everybody else.
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We’ve had 3 “once in a lifetime” financial meltdowns in like 25 years now.
Our banks need bailing out like every 10 years.
The arrogance of thinking that we’ve figured out the economy even in the Newtonian sense is part of why, I think.
Like, I hear you, but at the same time it just doesn’t align with even the broadest observations.
And when a theory doesn’t align with observed data, I have to be critical of the theory…
I’m interested in if you can expand your explanation to account for it, though. It’s super low stakes and I don’t think it’s really possible to prove any of it so I think it’s a great subject for thought experiments.
I mean, we see the exact same uncertainty all the time in real-world applications of the hard sciences as well.
Weather prediction, for example, is still just as inexact a science as macroeconomics in its application, even though it’s entirely physics-driven and we have a pretty complete understanding of each of the variables involved on a theoretical level. The system is just complex and chaotic enough that understanding the theory of weather doesn’t mean that we can successfully model the real-world behavior of weather.
This doesn’t mean that we should conclude that all theory relating to weather is incorrect - that would we throwing the baby out with the bathwater - it just means we still have a ways to go when modeling the real-world complexities that come with the theory.
The economist’s fundamental assumptions are wrong. The free market rational actor model is wholly incompatible with the ability of a finance or marketing industry to exist because marketing could never inform or convince anyone of anything and contracts can provide anything financialisation does without giving 10% of your income to someone who did nkthing. Given that both exist and together dominate the industry of the wealthiest countries, we know that none of it is real, and that the people pushing it also know this.
Psychology and physics are founded in empiricism, not post-hoc rationalisations of what the powerful wanted to do anyway.
The economist’s fundamental assumptions are wrong. The free market rational actor model is wholly incompatible with the ability of a finance or marketing industry to exist because marketing could never inform or convince anyone of anything and contracts can provide anything financialisation does without giving 10% of your income to someone who did nkthing.
This is either an intentional strawman of economic theory or a naive understanding based off a single Intro to Economics class.
It’s like arguing that physics’ fundamental assumptions are wrong because basic physics problems assume that cows are spheres with no air resistance.
Psychology and physics are founded in empiricism
A significant amount of modern economic research is empiricist, but even if it weren’t, empiricism and rationalism go hand-in-hand in scientific inquiry. Rationalism is what allowed Mendel to posit “units of inheritance” over a century before the existence of DNA was empirically verified, and Schwarzschild to posit the existence of black holes almost a century before black holes’ gravitational waves were first measured. Decades of productive research were had in advance of these empirical discoveries thanks to models built on rationalist inquiry, so “it’s not empiricist” isn’t quite the insult you seem to think it is.
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Lol.
Okay. You Poe’d me. Nice parody. Well done.
??
Oh. You were serious with the “it doesn’t matter if it conflicts with reality if I thought a bit because it’s ‘rational’ and directly contradicting reality is the same as an approximation” schtick?
I don’t know if that sad or even funnier.
I still don’t see this as an oranges to oranges comparison. Or even oranges to mandarins. Or oranges to limes.
I accept that both systems (weather and economics) are both “chaotic systems”. That doesn’t make them equivalent though. Some infinities are larger than others.
Trying to model the behaviour of a single human is an incredibly difficult task. Trying to model the behaviour of billions is harder. Then you need to blend in their relationships to eachother. Then you need to blend in their relationships with their means of sustainance. With their individual values. Etc etc etc.
I accept that some PORTONS of the models are pretty sound. Supply and demand curves? Sure.
I’ll hit you with a thought experiment:
If it’s the case that it’s just a matter of reading your econ textbook and then you can accurately model the economy, or even a small part of it, then extracting disproportionate wealth becomes a simple matter of doing some math.
Why isn’t every econ grad wealthy? Why are there wealthy people who run exactly the inverse plays? Why do the most powerful institutions require bailouts?
I’m not saying that the theory is bad, but it’s a masterbutory exercise. Applying the theory results is such disparate actual outcomes make it more like legend then law.
However, I personally think that the frequent rejection of that reality serves a different psychological purpose, which is the need to translate wealth distribution to an explainable system… Specifically one that explains favourably to people who already have the wealth.
Why am I rich and you’re poor? It’s simple: I merely understand the physics of the economy. You don’t. If you did, you would be where I am.
And, if someday you gain great wealth, it will be as a direct result of the actions you took, made with confidence as a result of unmistakable stimuli, that anyone could have done.
Understand me when I say I’m not discounting economic theory wholesale… Not at all. I am just saying giving it more credence than it truly deserves has a peripheral benefit in providing a justification for some kinda shitty social structures that exist now… That ALSO have science backing them. For example, the study of social mobility.
Trying to model the behaviour of a single human is an incredibly difficult task. Trying to model the behaviour of billions is harder. Then you need to blend in their relationships to eachother. Then you need to blend in their relationships with their means of sustainance. With their individual values. Etc etc etc.
Trying to model the behavior of a single eddy of wind is an incredibly difficult task. Trying to model the behavior of billions is harder. Then you need to blend in their relationships to eachother. Then you need to blend in their relationships with the causes of those individual eddies. With their individual values. Etc etc etc.
If it’s the case that it’s just a matter of reading your econ textbook and then you can accurately model the economy, or even a small part of it […]
It’s not the case. My entire comment was about why that’s not the case at all. Extracting disproportionate wealth is hard for the same reasons weather forecasting is hard. Not because of the theory, but because of the complexity of the system the theory describes.
I’m not saying that the theory is bad, but it’s a masterbutory exercise. Applying the theory results is such disparate actual outcomes make it more like legend then law.
You still haven’t shown how this is any different to applying the theory of weather forecasting, or applying the theory of plate tectonics and still failing to predict earthquakes, etc.
However, I personally think that the frequent rejection of that reality serves a different psychological purpose, which is the need to translate wealth distribution to an explainable system… Specifically one that explains favourably to people who already have the wealth.
You’re conflating the science of economics with the meta-discussion surrounding the politics of economics.
This is just like someone arguing that weather science is bullshit because we can’t successfully predict the weather, and it therefore only exists as an excuse to implement more damn liberal environmental policies.
If weather prediction were based on the idea that eddies were produced by gnomes with wooden spoons, you’d have an argument.
We have a fairly solid understanding of an ideal economy. If the economy was run according to current theory, we’d avoid a lot of issues (and find new ones we would address, of course).
However, the economy is run according to political whims, so most of the economic theory gets thrown out the window. It’s pretty easy to run into major issues when nothing stays consistent for more than a couple years, and the interests of those in charge do not include a stable and sustainable economy.
“If reality was the thing we made up, the thing we made up would be science” isn’t a great defense. Neoclassical economics is not science, it’s barely even a semi-coherent fairy tale.
It’s more “if people quit trying to break the system to enrich themselves, and the politicians actually agreed to empower the agencies which are supposed to oversee and regulate large companies and financial institutions, and we actually listened to the data instead of the soundbites that sound good as long as you don’t think about them much, we’d be much better off.”
Economists are not in charge of anything, politicians and rich people are. And they aren’t incentivized to run things like an economist, because then they would make less money.
Just because the people with an incentive to blow up the economy to make money end up blowing up the economy to make more money every few years doesn’t mean economics is at fault for that. It’s like saying climate science isn’t real because earlier projections of global warming were more optimistic, when the real reason is the science was suppressed and downplayed by the people making boatloads of money off fossil fuels.
If your argument is “we’d be describing the economy if the economy would be what we described” you’re just demanding reality change to fit the story.
The correct analogy would be if the climate deniers working for Chevron were held up as field experts, and that the institution of climate science stood behind them, then anyone who pointed it out was just told we need to organise agriculture on more +4.5 degree compatible terms.
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Economics is an extremely broad field, encompassing things that are closely related to psychology (e.g. behavioral economics), and things that are related to physics and natural science (e.g ecological economics), as well as pure mathematics (e.g. game theory) so trying to say it has more in common with one than the other is kind of a vacuous statement or category error.
To those who are angry at normative claims and policy prescriptions from the economic orthodoxy/zeitgeist, I understand your frustration. I would say what you’re angry at is not economics itself (which is simply the study of scarcity and related human behavior) but economics done badly. Such as the Chicago school.
Setting aside the emotional baggage related to these issues, there are some really beautiful and fascinating topics in economics that borrow very directly from statistical physics in the analysis of financial time series data (and also apply to a wide variety of fields like network traffic, the distribution of metals in ore, turbulent flows in fluid dynamics, and the distribution of galaxies in space), originally identified by Benoit Mandelbrot.
It’s crazy how much people will vehemently defend a position with little to no knowledge of the subject. It’s easy to just pin it on the dunning-kruger effect, but in this case I think it’s definitely tied to how much people despise economists. Which I find kinda funny since it’s like getting angry at the weatherman for bad weather.
Also, are there any communities dedicated to actually discussing economics? I’d really like to spitball actual solutions to a shitty economy rather than the wishful thinking capitalists & communists rely on.
I can sympathize with them, as the way economic thought is portrayed in popular journalism makes it seem like ivory tower eggheads concocting overly-mathematized models to support bad policies. And I do believe there is some truth to this, with bad economists hiding shitty ideas behind the veneer of respectability that math provides. Science and technology are almost fetishized in our culture, especially by those who don’t really study them academically, and I believe disingenuous economists and politicians use this fact to their advantage.
What they must realize is that whatever flaws they might identify to overhaul these bad economic models leads to… more economics! Hopefully better economics. But they’re still participating in the field known as economics.
For instance, noting that the “homo economicus” doesn’t exist IRL isn’t really the gotcha that many people think it is. Rather, anybody doing economics properly is acutely aware of this fact, and is just exploring the limits of what such a simplifying assumption can yield. E.g. a surprisingly large mileage from the very parsimonious axioms of utility given by Von Neumann and Morgenstern. The really interesting and difficult part is thinking about how and why real life data deviates from the predictions made by the simple assumptions.
Making such reasonable and well thought comments under the name “Prager U” should be a crime.
numerology surely. Because you can properly use mathematical operations and statisticsl tools in ways that are physically meaningless.
A sled-dog laden with taxidermied heads goes faster and faster as heads are removed. The economist is surprised but the biologist is not when removing the final head doesn’t make the dog run even faster, but stops it dead.
Behavioral economics was my favorite and I’d say it’s tied closely to game at its core, they’re both trying to predict human choices game theory just tries to quantify it with math. None of it is “pure math” it’s all theory with math attempting to support it. It’s only in like the last 100 years math even came into economic theory. I always enjoyed reading theory from the less recent economists (before they were even called economists) because it’s more pure theory/philosophy.
Hard science — inquiry into the nature of the “hard materials” like rocks.
Social science — inquiry into shared meanings on the material stuff around us, including the “hard materials” like mountains, and “soft intangible stuff” like taboos and beliefs, prices, and demand.
A lot of people assume “hard” means the serious stuff and social science as the easy and abstract stuff. Nothing could be further from the truth.
Economics is a social science. Sadly, the fascination with it being “hard” is largely to be seen as the cool tough stuff. Inferiority complex, if you may.
Economists rarely actually work as hard as Sociologists or similar soft sciences.
I would actually love to hear you elaborate on that.
In what way sociologists work harder than economists?
I’d argue that when it comes to science, you can’t study economics without studying sociology and politics. Because then you will be lacking context. Wouldn’t that mean more research?
In fact, how do you define “hard work”?
I’m acually curious, it’s an interesting topic.
I do not have the answers you’re looking for, I was being flippant.
Life goes smoothest when you recognize that effort is a limited resource
No one here has acknowledged the difference between classical economics and neoclassical economics (or even the difference with post-keynesian economics). Classical economics makes descriptions and predictions that can be falsified.
It also takes into account social context by understanding the social forces that come into play in a society at a given point. For example, the profit motive is understood as a historical force reinforced by capitalism itself.
All of this is modeled in a stochastic manner, which reflects both the variation in human behavior and the strong tendencies in human behavior. Once again, these models are testable.
All of this contrasts with the idealized and unscientific notion of economics that was cooked up at the end of the 18th century: neoclassical economics. This is what is taught to most people.
Neoclassical economics doesn’t seek to describe the forces that motivate human beings as much as assume that people are utility maximizers. Therefore, social context is explained reductively. Predictions are harder, because what leads the way isn’t evidence, but assumptions. Of course, there’s a political component to not show capitalism as a historical reality as much as both a reflection of universal truths of human nature and a desirable social arrangement.
It’s sad to confirm that neoclassical economics has dominated the economics departments and school curricula of the world. However, many scholars fortunate enough to be given a stable job despite not believing in the contemporary doctrine are doing amazing work. For example, Shaikh.
With this in mind, classical economics has to resemble physics to the extent that physics describes stochastic processes. In fact, Shaikh explicitly recognizes that pressure as a measure is a stochastic measure because, even though you can’t predict the trajectory of a single atom, you can predict how many atoms will interact on an aggregate level. The same happens with humans.
This is really interesting, although some of it goes over my head! Can you recommend any good videos on the subject?
Hey come on now, don’t insult psychology by comparing it to economics.
Pretty sure this isn’t that controversial of an opinion. Pretty sure any economist that disagrees with you is a shit economist. There’s a reason there’s a related field called “socioeconomics”
Also fuck this meme format. Stop using this facist for memes.
The primary function of economic forecasting is to make astrology look respectable.
Steven Crowder is an assclown.
Economics started as a branch of philosophy that got a lot of support because it draw a lot of support for its theory from maths.
Then, more recently, a good number of very inteligent people noticed the behaviours of economic models could be better predict and understood by using very simple psychological analysis and models.
I remember reading an article by two physicists where they just picked the oh-so-precious math of a given economic model, analysed it using the methods used to analyse physics and concluded the model was faulty by x+y+z.
Economics is… a very strange thing.
All science started as an offshoot from Philosophy.
Yes but most people tend to think Economics is an offshoot of Mathematics, due to its connection with it.
What connection? It has about as much connection to math as astrology or social science
Social Sciences use statistics and probability mathematics.
Astrology, to what I know, uses a lot of trignometry.
After checking the syllabus for an Economics degree in my country there courses of Calculus, Accounting and Algebra, all mandatory.
Whatevs. That doesn’t make Economics a branch of mathematics
