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.
@Patricia oh they are still on THAT shit? When it has been proven again and again that a person is NOT transactional, maximally selfish, and instead actually has emotions, and does not spend its entire day sussing out economic factors with maximum precision?
Please, please tell me there's some mold breaker here, and that this isn't the avant garde state of economics, since... holy Jesus mother fuck
@ShadowJonathan their entire field is based on this. The only option would be to trash it, so they ignore it.
@Patricia ...*really??*
When I think of "economics" as a field, I actually think of the modelling of *businesses* more than the modelling of *people*
Businesses are much closer to that maximally efficient economic entity than what humans really are, and so I imagine a field more about how businesses exploit resources, maybe something about the interaction of shareholders and the drive for ROI
...but everything still only being based around the individual? When that has been proven in social fields that it's bogus?
Urghhhhhhhhhh
@ShadowJonathan sorry to say it, but it seems like our mutual friend @Patricia is trapped in an outdated idea about economics, kept alive by Russian propaganda. Everything changed after the 2008 financial crisis, when the last holdouts of neoliberalism was discredited.
@ShadowJonathan The international financial community, The world bank, IMF, G7, and IBS, has all moved passed these outdated ideas. Some notebale holdouts are The UK (until labour took over), and Russia. Other then that it's mostly soggy old professors that setup their teaching plan in the 80's.
@ekg @ShadowJonathan and Germany, I'm sorry btw...
but yeah... being from Germany and seeing how some of those discussions are going I tend to forget that parts of the world are already moving on and that the mentioned institutions even criticize Germany being way too restrictive with their finances.
But here in Germany a often repeated talking point is still "we have to earn the money before spending it", even from social democrats and it's just triggering me 🙃
@karolherbst It said that progress occurs one death at a time. These is why experts are so important, if you don't live and breath these things it's much easier to continue to belive what you already do. Especially if you are financially well off; it has worked fine for *me* all this time, why change it now?
