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5 hours agoGo away, you are unwanted in this conversation.
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Cake day: December 9th, 2023
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Na sorry, you need to give up your Duke Of Blahaj title now
1·5 hours agoI mean both
The fact that Israel is deploying main battle tanks in their open air prison tells you everything you need to know about this genocide and the IDF.
151·2 days agoThe british royal family is a massive for-profit real estate enterprise that is obsessed with marketing, that is why.
You are right, nobody cares compared to the material crimes, it is only cynical structures of profit and wealth that care.
I mean, Biden is definitely responsible for running a stupid af campaign as a wayyyyy too old candidate and then falling apart at the worst moment…? Doesn’t make him the one that is doing the evilest things, it doesn’t make him as shitty as Republicans and Trump, but yeah, I do find Biden responsible in a lot of ways?
Wow, just like all these people ‘going broke slowly’!
1000 pikachu faces
Well, here is the thing chemistry and physics evolved out of philosophy as a pursuit of finding theories to explain the world whereas economics evolved out of philosophy as a way of imposing an ideology on others about how society is best structured and what is “natural” for society vs. “unnatural”.
Chemistry and physics are actually sciences, they seek to understand the natural world through theories, economics on the otherhand imposes its ideology on reality and then starts from there in its quest to understand as it cosplays as an actual respectable science.
Chemistry and physics have predictive power, economics is like music theory it is always just explaining why things happened in retrospect with no actual window into what motivates and causes patterns. Everything is imposed after the fact and then worked back from the imposed set of axioms. The best that can be said about economics at this point is that it is a set of pattern matching tools that are struggling to evolve into a science, and yeah I don’t think it is there yet or even particularly close because of the mindset of most people in economics who have sway over the direction the “science” moves do not think and act like scientists.
Deducing laws from premises deemed eternal and beyond question is a time-honoured method. For thousands of years, monks in medieval monasteries built a vast corpus of scholarship doing just that, using a method perfected by Thomas Aquinas known as scholasticism. However, this is not the method used by scientists, who tend to require assumptions to be tested empirically before a theory can be built out of them.
But, economists will maintain, this is precisely what they themselves do – what sets them apart from the monks is that they must still test their hypotheses against the evidence. Well, yes, but this statement is actually more problematic than many mainstream economists may realise. Physicists resolve their debates by looking at the data, upon which they by and large agree. The data used by economists, however, is much more disputed. When, for example, Robert Lucas insisted that Eugene Fama’s efficient-markets hypothesis – which maintains that since a free market collates all available information to traders, the prices it yields can never be wrong – held true despite “a flood of criticism”, he did so with as much conviction and supporting evidence as his fellow economist Robert Shiller had mustered in rejecting the hypothesis. When the Swedish central bank had to decide who would win the 2013 Nobel prize in economics, it was torn between Shiller’s claim that markets frequently got the price wrong and Fama’s insistence that markets always got the price right. Thus it opted to split the difference and gave both men the medal – a bit of Solomonic wisdom that would have elicited howls of laughter had it been a science prize.
https://www.theguardian.com/news/2017/jul/11/how-economics-became-a-religion
Today, the influence of religious thinking on economic thinking is most readily visible in America’s public conversation about economics and the country’s debate over economic policy. Members of evangelical Protestant denominations in particular hold sharply different views on many questions of economic policy than Americans on average, including members of the country’s mainline Protestant denominations. These differences are even greater among evangelical denominations considered “traditionalist.” Similar differences appear in responses to surveys focusing not on economic policy but on underlying presumptions about how the economy works: whether individual economic success is mostly a matter of luck or hard work, or whether the poor are trapped in their poverty.
Such religiously grounded differences in people’s worldview also go a long way toward explaining the puzzle, much discussed in the empirical political science literature, of why so many Americans vote in ways apparently contrary to their economic self-interest. Why, for example, do so many low-income voters oppose taxes that they would never have to pay and benefit programs on which they rely? Why do so many people living in areas blighted by industrial waste and pollution oppose regulation or other policies to prevent such damage, or efforts to clean up what has occurred in the past? The strong correlation between people’s views on such matters and either their religious affiliations or their individual religious beliefs suggests that any effort to understand these observed patterns without taking account of the role of religious ideas in shaping people’s thinking on matters of economics is, at best, seriously incomplete.
https://thereader.mitpress.mit.edu/the-deep-religious-roots-of-american-economics/
As Romer told me: ‘You can’t overestimate the way that “theory beats fact” has infected economics.’
https://aeon.co/essays/economics-is-once-again-becoming-a-worldly-science
Mainstream economics focuses on two production factors — labour and capital. Energy and raw materials are ignored, which means that biophysical or ecological limits are disregarded in the pursuit of growth. According to Australian economist Steve Keen, that approach was embedded within the discipline of economics when Adam Smith shifted the focus on sources of wealth from land/environment to labour in his famous book The Wealth of Nations.
By reframing overt poverty, slums, and inequality as seen in parts of America and all across the undeveloped world — which is a direct result of neoliberalism and imperialist capitalism as a whole — as a byproduct of freedom and a failure of a country or people to elevate itself out of poverty, squalor is made a ‘misuse of liberty,’ thus negligible. The poor are not downtrodden, but a vast array of individual failures. Neoliberal ideology and its countless predecessors take from terms like ‘poverty’ any serious meaning: they become non-words, ignorable, pointless, societal troughs worthy of neglect.
With the individualism inherent to neoliberalism, the working-class thus loses a cohesive sense of identity, as it’s tainted with a sense of ‘otherness.’ It’s no longer a ‘class’, as individualist ideology and economics mean each individual is seen as an isolated unit, not as a person with an identity contingent on the collective. The working class is a mass of neoliberalism’s disappointments; an aggregate of lost causes with a dormant potential for improvement, instead of a class whose poverty is a systemic symptom.
https://medium.com/deterritorialization/the-neoliberal-re-definition-of-the-human-bba208b82a7b
“The way economics is taught in universities does not include half the tools and concepts necessary to understand economic problems. The core of economics teaching is mathematics, statistics, macroeconomics and microeconomics, meaning that there is no pluralism in terms of theories and disciplines,” says Arthur Jatteau, the University of Lille economist who led the project.
Such formalisation is a product of the discipline’s history. Economics started as a branch of philosophy, evolving into a social science in the 19th century. Even then, it was largely free of mathematics. Adam Smith’s The Wealth of Nations includes no equations. Despite its humble beginnings as a ‘moral science,’ the discipline soon adopted mathematical modelling in an effort to wear the impenetrable armour of objectivity that only ‘hard’ sciences like physics can boast of.
The turn towards neoclassical approaches, which emphasise supply and demand equilibriums, enabled economists to pass their policy prescriptions as scientific analysis. “Mathiness comes from this pursuit of influence,” says George DeMartino, an economist who teaches at the University of Denver. “It sends a signal to policymakers that they don’t understand what economists do and therefore they must defer to their judgement.” Milton Friedman, the high priest of free markets, famously argued that it did not matter if models made unrealistic assumptions, as long as they accurately forecast the economy’s ups and downs. For many economists, this approach is necessary for the science to maintain its academic rigour. “Mathematics in economics brings transparency in that it makes assumptions explicit. So the models still work in most cases,” says Jon Danielsson, an economist and co-director of the LSE’s Systemic Risk Centre.
The issue came to the fore recently due to the failure of models to predict the inflation crisis. In an astounding admission, Belgium’s central bank governor Pierre Wunsch acknowledged that the European Central Bank’s models were practically useless. “It was more or less impossible in our models to produce any inflation that would not be temporary,” Wunsch said last year, explaining that they always showed price rises falling under the bank’s two percent target. The issue had broader political repercussions, with central banks taking flak for failing to grapple with the first inflation crisis since the early 1980s.
…
While concerns over academic integrity and research reproducibility are not uncommon among other sciences, economics faces a much bigger ethical crisis. One piece missing from its models, argues George DeMartino, author of The Tragic Science: How Economists Cause Harm, is an understanding of the harm that theories can cause, as most economists believe that some collateral damage is the price to be paid for a higher good. The gap separating economists from those who cannot master its advanced mathematics results in a sense of entitlement.
“There’s this profound paternalism in the profession that economists know best, and society should defer to our judgement because everybody will be better off,” DeMartino says. “If you take this approach, you find that it’s okay to deceive.” One example is the ‘Shock therapy’ imposed on post-Soviet Russia by a group of Russian and foreign economists, seeking to transform the country into a market economy. The economic argument, DeMartino suggests in his book, was a smoke screen for economists to pursue their agenda. As an antidote to such behaviour, he believes that economics teaching needs to incorporate ethics, notably what he calls ‘moral geometry’: the study of how complex economic policies could affect and potentially harm different groups.
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“Until economics recognises its limits in terms of predicting the future, we economists shouldn’t have too much influence in these areas,” says DeMartino, adding: “Economics has aspired to be the physics of the social world for over 100 years. That pretension has to be dropped.”
https://www.worldfinance.com/special-reports/is-economics-broken
As it happens, most of these concepts were borrowed from the methodology of natural science in general and from astronomy, or astrophysics as it is now called, in particular. Early practitioners in the field of political economy can, in all probability, be acquitted of the charge of harbouring any malicious intentions in developing this methodology but introducing concepts from mathematics and physics threw open the door of adding the appellation ‘science’ to the subject of economics. Indeed, the popularly known LSE had been given the title London School of Economics and Political Science when it was established in 1895, thus effectively claiming that economics was, in fact, a science no different from the natural sciences.
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Meanwhile, the mathematisation of economics had given it the superficial credentials of a science so that any other views, particularly value judgements, were given short shrift and dismissed as lacking in rigour. The claim – essentially untested – was that policy-making relating to issues of social justice and equity should not interfere in the functioning of markets, as it would lead to sub-optimal outcomes. Ideally, the state should only concern itself with internal security and defence and leave everything else to the markets.
What is the reality? As an intellectual discipline, economics has built its theoretical framework on several assumptions regarding the behaviour of individual men and women and about society within which those individuals live. But the economic system that we have to live with, apart from its own internal mechanics and rationale, is not only concerned with inflation and unemployment; it has to operate within some ethical framework. It is man-made and needs to conform with the underlying value system of society. However, many economists contend that introducing morality is outside the remit of both traditional and neoliberal, market-driven economic theorising. The question is whether such a contention can be seriously maintained. While people might take a relativistic view of morality it is also the case that there are basic ethical feelings that virtually all of us as human beings share – kindness, harmony, fairness and justice.
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As Keynes said: ‘The master economist must possess a rare combination of gifts… He must be a mathematician, historian, statesman, philosopher – in some degree and touch abstract and concrete in the same flight of thought.’ He also said that ‘the fundamental problem is to find a social system which is efficient economically and morally’. Keynes made these comments nearly a century ago and they remain as valid today as in the 1930s. It is a harsh judgment but economics, pretending to be a science, has failed abjectly to provide solutions to the world’s most pressing problems. Let it now learn humility. Perhaps, wisdom can then follow.
Unlike the labor theory of value, the utility or subjective theory is completely empirically untestable, a point which Marxist economist Paul Cockshott makes in his defense of the labor theory and critique of Alfred Marshall, who’s often considered the father of neoclassical economics[3]. The neoclassicals consider consumer demand to be a primary determinant of commodity prices, but a commodity’s perceived utility is an entirely subjective factor which cannot be quantified, and thus cannot be measured or compared to other commodity values numerically. This is the opposite of labor theory which measures commodity values by the average quantity of labor time needed to produce it. The utility theory of value is entirely based on the subjective perceptions of consumers which can’t be quantified and thus can’t be compared to commodity prices. This means that neoclassical economists can never actually test their theory that consumer demand determines the price of a commodity, unlike labor time on the other hand, which correlates very closely to commodity prices (as we will discuss later). The subjective nature of the utility theory, or the subjective theory of value, has been very useful for the neoclassical ideologues who defend it and allege that it has disproved the labor theory.
A Nobel prize in economics implies that the human world operates much like the physical world: that it can be described and understood in neutral terms, and that it lends itself to modelling, like chemical reactions or the movement of the stars. It creates the impression that economists are not in the business of constructing inherently imperfect theories, but of discovering timeless truths.
To illustrate just how dangerous that kind of belief can be, one only need to consider the fate of Long-Term Capital Management, a hedge fund set up by, among others, the economists Myron Scholes and Robert Merton in 1994. With their work on derivatives, Scholes and Merton seemed to have hit on a formula that yielded a safe but lucrative trading strategy. In 1997 they were awarded the Nobel prize. A year later, Long-Term Capital Management lost $4.6bn (£3bn)in less than four months; a bailout was required to avert the threat to the global financial system. Markets, it seemed, didn’t always behave like scientific models.
Whatever you believe it to be is wildly inaccurate. Just because there’s a single part of economics you don’t like, doesn’t mean the sum total of all that knowledge is bad or corrupt. That’s such an incredibly bad and completely illogical take. It’s like saying math isn’t real because you just learned about imaginary numbers.
No, there is hardly any incentive to bullshit in math, math is hard to use to directly justify violence whereas the foundation of modern economics study is based on extensively justifying the violence of those who fund their “science”.
Yes, a basic fundamental conflict of interest like this actually does deeply call into question whether the sum total of all that knowledge is bad or corrupt?
Can you not see that?
You gave me a bunch of technical nonsense defending your area of expertise and it just made you look worse, like you are trying to defend your gambling addiction or something.
The problem isn’t economists, it’s that you believe the people on TV are the experts instead of industry plants. Actual experts, they get ignored. All the time. Because they can’t compete with the amount of idiots on TV saying the opposite.
Well, that is a problem but so is your extreme naivety about what is driving this. If you actually cared, and you were actually willing to understand the breadth of the problem you would be ashamed to call yourself an Economist in public or admit you wasted your time at university studying it for a major. If you want to study power and money, call yourself something else, there is no integrity to Economics and it is hilarious that your best defense of Economics and its explanation of the world is that no all the people doing the stupid things are not stupid they are just selfish and lying… ok? That makes it worse? Like a LOT worse?
The experts can’t compete with the industry plants BECAUSE the basic effective function of Economics has always been to give legitimacy and permission to the ruling class to do whatever the hell they want. That fact that you can’t see that is embarassing and just because there are plenty of genuine people in Economics doesn’t redeem it from this fact.
The nerve of you to say “well I have been personally benefitting of this and yet NO ONE has listened to me!” is great. Your worldview is broken, the only way you can understand how the big changes happen around you is to prescribe an incredible overbearing selfishness to everyone or to call everyone irrational and it invariably leads people like you to an indifferent cynicism that is ironically perfect for being manipulated by the ruling class.
It is honestly hilarious how dumb the financial industry is for all its mystique, like the stock market hasn’t crashed yet? It really makes it obvious how much of a pseudo-science Economics is, it is only useful to rationalize the behavior of the ultrawealthy, spoiled and stupid, not to hold them to any kind of account or ideological consistency.
The US economy is fucked and the fact that so many finance and economics people aren’t screaming the alarm at the top of their lungs tells you everything you need to know about the intellectual integrity of these people.
When the four horseman of the apocalypse show up and see Marjorie Taylor they check their notes.
"Wait was one of us supposed to be off today? No, ok but how does this make sense then?
points at MTG
the other horsemen shrug in response
“You know what, nevermind whatever Ken you take the day off then.”
It is hilarious how overconfident US conservatives are here, the US is a collapsing empire what leverage do we have to do anything but speed up de-dollarization?
I mean I know Trump’s body is a dumpster about to collapse any moment from decades of cocaine and BK burgers, he doesn’t care, but this is clearly disaster capitalism, classic Shock Doctrine by Naomi Klein shit.
Republicans clearly want to pump and dump the entire US economy, damn the consequences, consequences are for people not blessed by God.
So so so so much sketchy illegal shit is gonna go through there lol
Fuck Trump