Author Joris Luyendijk: Economics Is Not a Science (theguardian.com) 375
The Real Dr John writes: A Nobel prize in economics, awarded this year to Angus Deaton, 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 modeling, 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. In 1994 economists Myron Scholes and Robert Merton, with their work on derivatives, seemed to have hit on a formula that yielded a safe but lucrative trading strategy. In 1997 they were awarded the Nobel prize in economics. 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.
Weep for humanity. (Score:2)
It's the dismal science [wikipedia.org]
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Hhh? It's the dismal science because of what it describes, not dismal at being science.
Care to elaborate?
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Care to elaborate?
He is saying that it is only "science" if it is easy or if we already know all the answers. Since he doesn't understand economics, and is too lazy to learn, it can't be science.
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It's a social science to be exact
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Care to elaborate?
He is saying that it is only "science" if it is easy or if we already know all the answers. Since he doesn't understand economics, and is too lazy to learn, it can't be science.
The fundamental for a "science" in the English language sense is that it should make statements which are potentially falsifiable. Experiment should rule. The problem with Economics is that the theory of Economics is affected by economics its self. For example, take the grandparent's statement
deflation is bad
This is actually true, at least now. If everybody knows there will be deflation then they know that if they hold on to their money it will be worth more in future. This encourages the flow of money to stop and gra
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Precisely this. For my part, this fairly obvious fact is highly likely to account for why inflation is never allowed to stop. Cynical? You bet.
Re: Weep for humanity. (Score:4, Insightful)
Precisely this. For my part, this fairly obvious fact is highly likely to account for why inflation is never allowed to stop. Cynical? You bet.
You know 99% of people are not 1%ers right? That means they owe more than they own so benefitting from inflation and even the rich don't worry about inflation because they invest and investments follow inflation. Only idiots with money in mattresses are hurt by inflation.
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Here's the example that disproves the claim: Everyone knows that when it comes to electronics, next year's model is going to be better/faster/more bang for the buck than this years' model, but the electronics industry isn't starving to death because of everyone sitting on the sidelines and refusing to buy devices because they'll get more for their money in the future.
It does no such thing, Yes, everyone does know, but some people need something now, and so buy it now. Pre-announcing has actually been shown to effect sales, just ask Adam Osbourne:
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Osborne_effect
Or perhaps ask Pebble and/or Motorola about their sales numbers when the Apple Watch was announced.
Inflation benefits governments and other profligate borrowers. Deflation benefits savers (and everyone else, to a lesser extent.)
Yeah, like people with mortgages. As for savers, have you looked at the savings rate over the last few decades (at least in North America)?
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This times a million... Economics is much more akin to religion the science. Economist are like the high priests of ancient times.
If this is the case, (economics being religious in nature) then the government would have no business setting rules and regulations that impact the US economy. Church and state first amendment issues aside, if the economy is really so unpredictable, then nothing they do can reliably influence it in the ways that they intend.
deflation is bad (its bad for some actors but its a huge boon for the majority)
Not at all. One thing that is constant in most economies is that the majority of people are borrowers.
Suppose you borrow some money to start a new business or buy a house, then suppose r
Re: Weep for humanity. (Score:4, Insightful)
In fact, the last time the US saw deflation was a period we now refer to as The Great Depression.
But not because of the deflation. The cause of the Depression was a widespread credit contraction, following an illusory boom—actually malinvestment, encouraged and masked by inflation—which resulted in a "house of cards": lots of investment profit on paper with nothing real to back it up. When the bills came due and people tried to pull "their" money out, they suddenly discovered that they didn't have nearly as much money as they thought; their savings accounts consisted mostly of IOUs from bankrupt banks. That was the cause, both of the deflation and the Depression. Deflation was merely a side-effect.
In other cases where deflation has been observed internationally, it has not been correlated with anything like the American Great Depression.
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No argument there.
Yes, in fact Roosevelt's own Treasury Secretary, Henry Morgenthau, thought Roosevelt was completely insane. He wrote as much in his diary:
We have tried spending money. We are spending more than we have ever spent before and it does not work.
I want to see this country prosperous. I want to see people get a job. I want to see people get enough to eat. We have never made good on our promises.
I say after eight years of this Administration we have just as much unemployment as when we started. ⦠And an enormous debt to boot!
Sound familiar? It should. Because Roosevelt's interventionist polices have been copied by Obama. Now the Fed has nowhere to go. Interest rates are still at rock bottom, and 3 rounds of "Quantitative Easing" did not work. Worker participation rates are at an all-time low in recent decades.
Many modern economists believe that Roosevelt actually prolonged the Depression,
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Religion is the belief in pixies, unicorns, zombie Jews, and other insane delusions. The only business the government has to be involved with religion is to insure that anybody can p
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Imagine people saving money while working hard when they can (20s-50) and never needing a pension if they did save money.
That is imaginary, not real. Most people in their 20s-50s go deep in debt to buy a house, own a car, educate their kids, etc. Their wealth is in the assets they own, not cash under a mattress. They do NOT benefit from deflation.
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Imagine people saving money while working hard when they can (20s-50) and never needing a pension if they did save money.
That is imaginary, not real. Most people in their 20s-50s go deep in debt to buy a house, own a car, educate their kids, etc. Their wealth is in the assets they own, not cash under a mattress. They do NOT benefit from deflation.
He is "imagining," not saying that is what happens. We go into debt because of the promise of a payout that will be far better than if we stuffed our deflationary mattresses. Which leads to his statement:
However, a slightly deflationary currency is very good for workers, and not so good for Governments who lose control over the populace through inflationary monetary policies.
Which, if I put on my tin foil hat, makes me believe that government -- not basic human greed -- propagated the Myth of Indefinite ROI after it worked so well for those who cashed in their equity in the 90s and early 00s.
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No, actually economies never grew to the scale of what we had today until people were able to borrow. What it comes down to is this: You as an individual likely have a very difficult time securing the capital needed to, for example, start a new business. So how do you do that? Simple, you borrow. Most businesses that exist today, even the most profitable ones, started out borrowing.
Prior to that, the method of securing capital was by waging war on your neighbor and keeping the spoils of war, and then using
LOW inflation is better in the long run (Score:3)
A more complex issue is the degree to which some inflation means that the central banks have some room to crash interest rat
Re: Weep for humanity. (Score:4, Insightful)
Economics is a social "science". Because it involves money, it feels more quantitative and objective, like an actual science. But it is a social science, arbitrary numbers have been assigned to ill defined metrics, and a delusion is formed. Perhaps those arbitrary assignments are the result of a real competitive process, left to anneal for a period of time, but that's just a further level of self-deception. We cling to these things individually because it is the best we've got socially, but at no level in the universe can you establish the value of an orange at X resources/unit, it's therefore impossible to build any kind of universal truth around a system that is fundamentally based on that sort of value assignment.
So when the talking heads start talking about economics, and making predictions and saying the sky is falling if {such and such}, it is ok to laugh and walk away. We'll make it work or we won't and it'll change.
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but at no level in the universe can you establish the value of an orange at X resources/unit
This is the only concrete assertion you made, and we already know it is false. Markets establish price for the orange (which a commonly accepted value for mass producers of oranges) and the producer of the orange already knows what inputs went into making that orange.
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Markets establish price for the orange
You mean a competitive process that is left to anneal for a period of time?
producer of the orange already knows what inputs went into making that orange
He knows what he was able to invest that was sufficient to produce the orange. He does not have any idea, or concern, about whether his investment covered the costs from his suppliers (human, corporate or natural). Nor does he know for t>0 that his costs will be covered by the market price, it may happen he has to
It should be obvious (Score:5, Insightful)
Economics is not a science. It is a study of human behavior like Psychology, and as the article points out, it has heavy political overtones. There was no Nobel Prize in Economics until 1969. Maybe it is time to retire that particular prize.
Re:It should be obvious (Score:5, Informative)
Psychology is a science, although a fairly new one.
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Economics is as much a science as psych or sociology.
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Re:It should be obvious (Score:4, Interesting)
If you broaden your definition of science to include all fields of human investigation, sure. But if you mean a science like biochemistry or physics, where you do controlled experiments, then no, it is not a hard science. Some people differentiate "hard" from "soft" sciences. OK, by that definition economics could be considered a soft science. But as the author of the article points out, there is much more political bias in "economics research" than in most sciences (where some bias is often unavoidable, but still can be manageable with proper controls). Really, economics is the study of trends in economic activity, but often strays into making pronouncements on political policy, which seems an awful lot more like politics than science.
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It's funny that we give them the names "hard" and "soft" sciences when it's much harder to get repeatable results in soft sciences,
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Yup they call them WEIRD
Western
Educated
Industrialized
Rich
Democratic
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There's a lot of psychology that is repeatable, like this for example:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
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Schooling. With the fishes. (Score:3)
Psychology 102:
Smart people also do Dumb things.
Dumb people also do Good things.
Good people also do Bad things.
Bad people also do Smart things.
Psychology 103:
Smart people also do Good things.
Dumb people also do Bad things.
Good people also do Smart things.
Bad people also do Dumb things.
Psychology 104:
Smart people also do Bad things.
Dumb people also do Smart things.
Good people also do Dumb things.
Bad people also do Good things.
Second year:
Psychology 201:
How to use statistics to imply anything
Psychology 202:
Th
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Economics is not a science. It is a study
A systematic, empirical study of a subject is a science by definition.
it has heavy political overtones
So does climatology and pharmacology.
human behavior
You forgot to wiggle your fingers mysteriously while you typed that. And I guess economic systems that don't have significant human involvement like HFT or the ecology of flowers and pollination can be safely ignored.
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A systematic, empirical study of a subject is a science by definition.
Nope, falsifiable experiments are. That's what allows use to make predictions.
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What would falsify private property, copyright and patents?
They aren't theories and hence, it doesn't make sense to speak of falsifying them.
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Astrology is a systematic, empirical study of the relationship between the alignment of planetary bodies and the observable traits and behavior of humans.
No, it's not.
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Khallow, your definition of science as any systematic study is incorrect, because to astrologists, they think they are doing a systematic study. As a scientist, I think a more rigorous definition would be a systematic study based on the scientific method which includes falsifiability as per Popper. How do you falsify a theory in economics? You can argue against the tenets put forward, but you can't do controlled experiments in an attempt to see if the null hypothesis is true or false.
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Khallow, your definition of science as any systematic study is incorrect, because to astrologists, they think they are doing a systematic study.
Why do astrologists' opinions invalidate the definition of science?
As a scientist, I think a more rigorous definition would be a systematic study based on the scientific method which includes falsifiability as per Popper.
Which is done in economics too.
How do you falsify a theory in economics?
The same way you invalidate it in any other science under the Popper scheme.
You can argue against the tenets put forward, but you can't do controlled experiments in an attempt to see if the null hypothesis is true or false.
Yes, you can. There's a lot of experiments in economic games, for example.
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Now, they uniformly *fail* those tests, so even if they are potentially valid scientific hypotheses, they're wrong and thus can be discarded, but that doesn't make them non-scientific in the first place.
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And the Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel is not a Nobel Prize.
As the full title says, it was instigated not by Alfred Nobel but by Sveriges Riksbank - the Swedish Bank, the central bank of the Swedish currency.
And this was done in 1969, 68 years after the first Nobel Prizes in natural sciences and literature.
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Economics is a huge field, encompassing mathematics, experimental science, and other methodologies.
Most papers in biology aren't reproducible, either. There's plenty of bad science and improper application of theory to go around in academia. Although I think economics is especially prone to bad methodologies and poor application, largely because it seems more accessible than it really is. Neither the public nor scholars are sufficiently skeptical and rigorous in their treatment of economics.
The irony is tha
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I would also point out that medicine as practiced by most physicians is not a science either. They use the fruits of science, but their field is based on an entirely different method of knowledge acquisition and application. Yet we don't regularly fault doctors for being "unscientific".
I always thought of my doctors as "meat mechanics": they listen to the engine and pound on things and to them to try to figure out what's wrong, and then take a stab at fixing the problem based on experience and various field repair manuals. Occasionally you'll require the intervention of an engineer (surgeon), but if I ever find myself talking to a scientist about the state of my health, I'll know I'm screwed.
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There's the old joke about the gynecologist who quit working as a doctor and went to school to become a mechanic. The final test comes and he's working for hours. He finally finishes and the instructor comes over and tells him that he has passed even though it took him an extra eight hours. The gynecologist cum mechanic asks why that's a problem. The instructor tells him that while he did a fine job that's the first time he's ever seen anyone do an engine swap through the exhaust pipe.
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It's Econ Nobel season, and so someone needs to do the job of standing up and repeating all the old disses. This year, it's Joris Luyendijk in The Guardian. [...] Anyway, this litany of critiques, repeated ad infinitum since the crisis, strikes me as mostly pretty lazy. There are good critiques out there. These are not they.
That said, I like Luyendijk's idea of adding a general social science prize to the Nobel roster. Nobels are silly anyway, so why not have one for every field? While we're at it, how about one in math and computer science, and one in psych/neuro/cognitive science? And one in visual arts? And one in writing snarky point-by-point rebuttals in blog posts?
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It's a bunch of bullshit rules we've put in place to keep the current system moving forward.
In other words, it works.
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Propping up our currency did not prop up our economy. It shit on our production/manufacturing while keeping Chinese goods cheap.
As you ironically say, 'common sense is not that common'.
If an investment strategy requires a... (Score:2)
nobel prize winner to explain it its probably doesnt work.
When an index fund beats actively managed funds 60-75% of the time it aint brain surgery.
Sound strategies like dollar cost averaging do work over the long run (15-20 years)
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Don't confuse "academic economists" with "political economists." Academic economists write papers; political economists write editorials and go on TV shows (although the same person can play each role at different times).
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In fact, explaining why the same get-rich-quick scheme will not work for everyone is economics. Because if everyone does the same thing, then the value of that thing will be very small (supply/demand).
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That stuff you just wrote, about the timeliness of get-rich-quick plans? That stuff? That's called "economics", and you just dabbled in it.
There's plenty of economics, that describes events involving money and markets well, and is thus a useful tool. Can you call it a science if it's not predictive? Bit of a reach at best. But it's still something useful.
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But it *is* predictive, about certain things, even though not predictive about others. E.g., it can predict that people will continue to get rich off of get rich quick schemes that don't work.
I suppose you could consider economics to be a sort of blend between statistics and psychology, and it doesn't work where the psychology is fuzzy, and its predictions are statistical in nature.
Mind you, if you consider it this way it become immediately obvious that most of what's sold as economics is a pack of lies.
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Not all games are zero-sum.
Try to see the big picture instead of stupid "get rich quick" schemes.
Just look at economic crisis : nobody seem to profit from it, even the 1% don't get richer. So why does it happen? The workers can still work, the factories are still there, no major shortage in natural resources, ... that's pure economics. So if people can lose out of nothing, they should be able to win out of nothing too.
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When an index fund beats actively managed funds 60-75% of the time it aint brain surgery.
It certainly isn't. [youtube.com]
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That's not clear, but if it both requires a Nobel prize winner to explain, and he's still poor enough that the money in the prize is significant, in that case it probably doesn't work.
It's a fuzzy science (Score:5, Funny)
It's a fuzzy science, similar to cooking.
Sometimes you try stuff, make predictions, and it turns out great.
Sometimes you try stuff, make predictions, and it's dreadful. Like my famous "Peanut Butter & Haggis" recipe, or pickle-flavored ice cream.
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Just curious, what was your prediction on that one?
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Just curious, what was your prediction on that one?
Ahem, well, lets just say I didn't think it would be as bad as it was.
I'm surprised the EPA didn't show up to cordon off my house. But the Food Police did show up and arrest me for vandalism, though.
Rocket analogy (Score:4, Interesting)
When a rocket blows up, it might be the engineers' fault, but you can't blame physics itself. It's not the fault of the field of economics that some bozo lost money and other bozos bailed them out.
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Any chance you could dumb this down into a car analogy for me?
An physicist builds you a car: real nice thing with gold plated windows. During the night, the car gets stripped. Rims stolen, battery ripped out and lying on the street, headlights bashed in, the entire top turned into a convertible. The engine was stolen for scrap metal. In the morning, you walk outside, and while you're calling the police, someone shoots you. When the police come, they steal your wallet. The police and the vandals walk off together for drinks and donuts.
It was a really nice car.
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Similarity to Quantum Mechanics (Score:2)
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In economics it seems that there are no fundamental rules or at least if there are nobody has yet found them given the total inability of economics to predict the economy.
It only seems that way to you because you know nothing about economics. Take a class or something and stop being ignorant.
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It only seems that way to you because you know nothing about economics.
Then why does economics fail to predict so many economic problems before they happen? You do not have to be a scientist to see that science can make predictions that work consistently. If economics is a science then it too should be capable of making clear predictions which work consistently. You do not need to be an economist to see that this is not the case.
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Study the iterated prisoner's dilemma. That can easily be mapped onto parts of economics. Cut away the parts that don't work and you have a sound piece of economics.
Just because there are hard problems that can't be solved doesn't mean that no problems can be solved. Unfortunately, in the case of economics it seems to repeately mean that the most important problems can't be solved.
Of course, we don't really know what problems economics could solve if it tried, because politics always gets mixed up in thi
People who think economics is not a science... (Score:5, Insightful)
Economics is a science, and it has a useful body of knowledge. MV = PQ is among the most tested theories in science. Gresham's law. The business cycle. All other things equal, an increase in supply will reduce prices. The biggest problem of economics isn't the lack of "hardness," it's the difficulty of running experiments (you can't re-run the depression six hundred times), so eliminating variables is difficult.
Anyone who thinks economics is the art of predicting the stock market, will be confused, like the author of this article.
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Economics is a science, and it has a useful body of knowledge. MV = PQ is among the most tested theories in science.
Your other points aside, MV=PQ is not a "tested theory", but rather an identity based on the mere definitions of the words, particularly the velocity V. You don't get much credit for that, in my book.
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Economics is a science in that respect.
You're also right that the repeatability of events make it very poor in practice. It should rightly be regarded within the restrictions of that as opposed to the 'conclusions' people draw from it relying on the success of the physical sciences.
People who study the Great Depression can be as brilliant and analytical is anyone else, but they ultimately have no way to prove that *the problem* was the money supply and if only they had increased it, it would have been avoid
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Well that's just your system. What if we brought in communism and simply gave everyone enough and made everyone work? An extreme example, but it applies to every minor law and social rule. You'd have a whole new set of laws to work within. The socio-political laws have just such a great impact. Not just communism. But every law, group of power...
Your ignorance is hurting you here. Supply/demand doesn't disappear just because you've implemented communism, someone will have to manage that. MV=PQ doesn't disappear because of communism. Economics doesn't disappear because of communism. In fact, the only way to implement a command economy is to have a solid understanding of economics: without it, you will almost certainly fail.
Capitalism != Economics. Economics can explain a lot that happens under capitalsim, but it can also explain a lot that happen
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you can't re-run the depression six hundred times
Keep voting for Republicans, and you can!
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The vast majority of bad loans would have never been made if the bankers didn't have the equivalent of a gun to their heads - The Community Reinvestment Act.
It would have happened anyway. There was easy money to be made and enough leverage to move the Moon.
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People like you would become smarter if you picked up an economics textbook.
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Also, the guy in your first link doesn't know what "Reason" means.
Re:People who think economics is not a science... (Score:4, Insightful)
It's not sceince if you never do any experiments.
That's the same argument against climate science, right? "You can't run CO2 experiments on multiple earths, because we only have one of them."
The reality though, is that both climate science and economics do run experiments. They can't run every experiment they'd like to, but that's a problem with every field of science.
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It's not sceince if you never do any experiments.
Tell that to an astronomer.
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1. It has not a single quantity that can be unambiguously defined.
People, materials, and the usual hard science parameters.
2. It has not a single quantity which two people in different places can measure, and get nearly the same result.
See above.
3. It has not a single law with predictive force.
Counterexample is the supply and demand model.
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Sounds like your knowledge of economics hasn't gone beyond that of reciting of stereotypical jokes.
Does this author actually 'get' what science is? (Score:3)
"Constructing inherently imperfect theories" is essentially the definition of science.
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No, It's clear that he doesn't. That's a terrible write up.
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Except is isn't. That covers all forms of theorizing.
Science is all about testing the theory. Theologians have theories, but they are as far from scientists as it's possible to be. Even further than economists.
Not sure anyone is claiming it is (Score:2)
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I didn't get the connection between the Nobel prize and it having to be a science. Does that mean Literature and Peace are now sciences?
What most people are forgetting is that is a social science. The leave out the social part. It's going to be different than chemistry and physics. Mind you most of the stuff I hear from economists is either obvious or seems like they pulled it out of their ass.
yeah (Score:2)
Human Action (Score:2)
by Ludwig von Mises. It's a hard read but worth it.
From wikipedia:
Mises came to be regarded by many as the archetypal 'unscientific' economist.
I think there is no higher praise calling an economist 'unscientific' knowing the questionable practices his 'scientific' colleagues do.
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Well, one that was in the news just yesterday is not validating the excel spreadsheet that was used to run the economics model.
Science can't be wrong? (Score:3)
Art (Score:3, Insightful)
Economics is a science, but it is also chaotic. (Score:3)
Just like Physics cannot predict the weather in the long term, because the weather is a chaotic system, Economics cannot predict the state of the market, not because it does not have theorems or its theorems are not correct, but because there are too many variables and the outcome cannot be predicted.
It's not even a real Nobel Prize (Score:5, Informative)
Nobel didn't originally accept economics as a science either, this economist won the Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel [wikipedia.org], which was originally provided by the Swedish bank in 1968 through a perpetual endowment to the Nobel Foundation.
Re:It's not even a real Nobel Prize (Score:5, Funny)
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Nobel didn't originally accept economics as a science either
Two questions:
(1) Do you think Nobel thought Literature [wikipedia.org] was a science?
(2) When John Harvard willed his library to the new college in Cambridge, it was basically a divinity school. That divinity college adopted his name. Does that mean that any person with a degree from Harvard other than divinity doesn't really have a "Harvard degree"?
Or...
Could it possibly be that people lump the economics prize together with the others because of the institution that awards it (under the same general nomination
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Economists definition of a recession: When the neighbour is unemployed.
Economists definition of a depression: When they are unemployed.
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If you think that economics is the science of predicting the future, you're mistaken. It's only very small part of it.
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Whether or not it's a science, economics is horrid at predicting the future. Case in point: all the economists who insisted that the Clinton tax hikes in the '90s would cause a recession, or all the economists- probably the same ones, really- who insisted that Obama's policies would result in a spike in inflation. In both cases, the exact opposite occurred: the economy boomed in the '90s, and inflation has remained a non-issue since Obama took office.
Economics is an attempt to explain, well, how economies w
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Having said that, I'm not seeing the alleged extra hate this year.