Political Memes

A lot of macroeconomics in particular seems to follow aristotlian thinking, i.e. you can just logic your way from step to step. It is interesting in that pure mathematics does work this way in that you can start with a bunch of axioms/definitions and combine them and work with them until you reach a conclusion without any need for experimentation. For example, you don't need to measure a bunch of triangles to show that the Pythagorean theorem is true.

The way i was taught macroeconomics in school, it takes the mathematical approach of starting with a list of assumptions that seem to be true, and using mathematical logic to derive conclusions. The trouble is that: 1) many starting assumptions aren't as true as you'd think, and 2) many of the "logical" steps also aren't as logical as you'd think.

Supply and demand is an easy example. The classic idea is that as supply goes up, price goes down, and vice versa, while as price goes up, demand goes down. The existence of Veblen goods (i.e., things that people want because they are expensive) shows that the demand part isn't right.

None of this would be a problem if it was just an intellectual exercise to help develop hypotheses for use with more sound scientific methods, but it's used for policy directly.

The real question is why we even bother discussing a curve which was pulled out of the ass of a man who went on to invent a hydralic computer to model the national economy of the United Kingdom. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phillips_Machine

I think his greatest achievement was to demonstrate the concept of being a really clever idiot.

Going off what I recall from econ 101 decades ago, the graph on the right violates ceteris paribus: it looks like a historical plot of inflation rate with unemployment rate. The attempted refutation of the Phillips curve looks like a strawman.

Other sciences would also be unsurprised their models don't model longitudinal observations that fail to control other variables over time.

Edit: clarification of strawman

I personally think the biggest flaw of economics is how it takes "people are rational actors" as an axiom.

The fact that so many people can be convinced to vote against their economic best interests by supporting the GOP shows how fallacious that axiom is.

Only tangentially related, but it's often accepted that there is no Nobel prize in economics. There is a Nobel memorial prize in economics (link), but as it was set up after Nobel's death it is in a slightly different category.

Economics is a subset of moral philosophy, which just happens to care a lot about mathematics but is (or should be) nonetheless primarily concerned with questions of morality.

There is more to economics than Milton Friedman. Marx was a pioneer in economics and leftest theory has been robust in the field from the beginning.

Criticizing soft sciences for their estrangement from mathematics is classic antiintellectualism. The same logic would demand the disillusion of psychology, sociology, and all the critical theories that are the foundation of modern leftest thought.

Economics is a historically flawed and ideological science. But I think it’s getting better and more empirical with time. The scientific method works, economists just have the come down from their high horses and actually follow the data.

The second graph is a fucking terrible graph as none of the data points correlate with a specific time which would be needed to make a proper comparison to the graph on the left.

If you thought this made sense you are mistaken. OP likely knows fuckall about economics

ok I checked the comments on this because I thought we were gonna start analysing the actual stuff in the graphs or something and now everyone's yapping about how economists are all evil or something

this is gonna get mass downvoted and I don't care

Economists are the priests of capitalism.

Economics is best understood as a priesthood, similar in purpose to haruspicy. Once you make that mental adjustment, everything they do, the types of employment they get, the vile drippings they emit, it all makes horrible, horrible sense.

Economics is a classic form of divination, like astrology or tarot, and its purpose is the same - to provide oracles who will serve the monarch and tell him that the things he wants will happen and the things he doesn't will not.