I’m still trying to learn economics, but I’m watching/listening university lectures, podcasts, interviews etc and this field is so stagnant it’s ridiculous. Important professors asked to analyze current crises just sit around arguing about whether Keynes or Hayek were in favor of government intervention in 1932. Or other critical current topics.

Dudes. Dudes. Come on.

And if you’ve lived through austerity policies: this is 100% the fault of economics. And they are 100% fandom/model based.

This field is almost exclusively fundamentalistic. And a tiny bit of dictatorship and/or suffering is broadly considered the Right Path to some fucked up nirvana.

There is hardly any data, and when there is it’s often so cherry picked it’s embarrassing. They will gladly take credit for effects years into the future, but zero responsibility for crashing an economy.

@Patricia how is there hardly any data??? in today's world we are fucking flooded with data

wtf??

@ShadowJonathan you’d think. But I have this nice formal model (high school math formula) and an ideology based in a dude who lived a century ago.

@Patricia god

I'd somewhat have expected economics to be very advanced rn but simply be beaten by complex real world situations

But it has hardly progressed???

The fuck??

@ShadowJonathan where most social sciences developed their fields to study the real world and embrace its complexity, economics decided that they could model the real world with very simple math based on ridiculously unreasonable assumptions and zero data. They just sit around and think about stuff. They think it’s science, but there is no experiments, no testing of hypothesis, it’s literally a pseudoscience.

@Patricia even if they think that they can attempt to model (parts of) the real world with math, all of those models are only small parts of a complex interacting system, socially, politically, and economically

Just... ???? Ah yes, I have reduced countless irl NP-hard problems to a simple math function, oopsie daisey if it causes an economy crash or two, ignore how it doesn't account for people living or dying

Just, urgh

@Patricia is the simple model stuff only because they can all agree on a simple model, and are all just throwing their large models into the aether, with no way to verify or legitimise them?

@ShadowJonathan it’s even sadder than that, it’s all based on “Methodological individualism” they don’t consider the economy a complex system, instead they start with the an individual stylized person “Homo economicus” and then everything builds from that.