Economics is closer to theology than physics as an intellectual discipline. Its power is proportional to the belief it commands.
Person with degree in Econ here:
Ah, yep. This is correct.
Our theologies tend to have more numbers than most religions, but most economic ‘schools of thought’ pretty much are just warring religious sects, the dynamics are quite similar.
That being said, I am speaking of the kinds of ‘economics’ the vast majority of people will ever hear about, due to how at least in the US, we mostly only popularize and give media time to what Academic Economists largely consider to be idiot crank fraud propogandists.
There are some actually good modern Academic Economists who you’ll hear from or about, from time to time, and they often are highly respected and credible because they have the capacity to consider the varying ideological/religious flavors of economic sects, and pick the parts of each of them that seem to actually be well evidenced, and make functional/causal sense, without discontinuity or contradiction.
Like uh, I myself can tell you that I find a lot of Marxist economics to be compelling and accurate, but, some of its proposed exact ideas on how prices and pricing work… are problematic.
Conversely, while I find the vast majority of Austrian economics to be voodoo bullshit, I do think they have at least a core framework of how to approach some dynamics in monetary policies that actually do track with reality better than most other economic ‘schools’, such as MMT.
What I mean is that they tend to pay way, way more attention to the different uh, levels, or kinds of money, and how they circulate around and interact with things like bond markets and interest rates, and from this you can get a more holistic picture of the actual state and behavior of monetary and financial systems… whereas a lot of other economists just hsnd wave away that complexity, and then come up with more ad hoc explanations for things that a sort of Austrian-derived monetary view can give you some useful predictive indicators from.
And, just to clarify, I am not an academic myself, just got to a specialization in econometrics and then went to work as a data analyst / ‘scientist’.
(I always found the job description of ‘data scientisr’ to be largely a misnomer, we’re basically just a flavor of statisticians? but sure, we are a scientist because boomers think knowing how to do stats on a computer is ‘science’? like we are… discovering new truths about the world???)
I’d say if you want a crash course in some non bullshit modern economics, check out uh, Richard Wolfe, Joseph Stiglitz, Yannis Varoufakis, Robert Reich.
Also, check out Paul Samuelson, who in his time did actuslly strongly push for using more robust and complex math (for economists, anyway) by borrowing from physics.
Oh right and we cannot forget the Beautiful Mind himself, John Nash, who also did a lot of serious, basically genius level math, and more or less made Game Theory into a massively useful and applicable framework for evaluating how and why agents make which choices in basically any definable scenario.
Really, he is a mathematician, not primarily an economist, but I at least find Game Theory to be a fundamentally necesarry tool in any serious economist’s toolkit, and Nash did win an Economics Nobel.
I can’t stand Wolfe for some reason and I’ve never seen any type of rigor from him. I read his “Democracy at Work” book, and he came up with the term “worker self-directed enterprises,” and kinda presented it as a novel concept when they were pretty much just another name for worker cooperatives. I’ve always liked Krugman’s articles/blog because he does get a little “wonkish” sometimes; I think he’s considered “New Keynesian” or something like that. Varoufakis and Reich are cool. Oh, there’s a youtuber I recently found, “Garys Economics,” which is pretty good (though he’s an ex-finance guy, not an economist).
Yeah this is kinda what I mean about Marxist economists: Broad strokes, high level, followable narrative that jives with overall aggregate data, often emphasizes important dynamics that others just totally do not mention, or garble-explain with technobabble?
Yes, good, generally very insightful and accurate in many ways.
But, when you go down to the nitty gritty level… it either just isn’t there, or is pretty clearly just wrong.
Like I’m sorry, but you can’t build a microeconomics based off of only the labor theory of value, it just does not work.
You can use it in certain situations where it becomes a reasonable approximation, but it is far from comprehensive.
And yes, I also find Krugman to be insufferably wonkish, I also still hate him for basically going along with bailing out the banks in the 08 GFC, instead of fucking jailing their execs and/or at least temporarily nationalizing them.
And and, Gary’s Economics is also generally good, though I haven’t seen too much of his stuff.
Game Theory is actually widely practical and useful if you actually have extensive formal training in all of its variations wnd complexities, and know how to use it properly.
Game Theory is a lot, lot more than just ‘the prisoners dilemma’.
And yes, the Economics Nobel technically isn’t a real Nobel, but also, the whole theme here is that Economics behaves much like a religion, and many/most economists and just general people treat it as if it is extremely meaningful.
To make this even more meta:
You can at least broadly model that with Game Theory, if you take into account a robust model of imperfect information, and how the transmission of information (or lack thereof) alters the preferences, ‘beliefs’, and thus decision making of actors in a connected system.
EDIT:
Anyway, the point of me mentioning Nash and his Econ Nobel is to illustrate that a lot of serious economists also find his work to be extremely important and relevant to economics.
Again, most actual serious, modern academic economists will tell you that no one in power actually listens to them, the powerful just pick idiot cranks with an Econ degree like Art Laffer to justify their ridiculous policies.
Its more complicated than you are simplifying it to.
…
Also, no, you did not specify anything about what you meant irt game theory applications.
You said it isn’t applicable to broad populations and everday activity, and I said it is broadly applicable to many things… which would include what you say it doesn’t cover.
A rather well known, other cross domain use of game theory is to explain the popularity of different mating strategie of various animals.
You can use similar models and apply them to humans, and it works well also.
…
Finally, your last point in particular reveals your total ignorance of game theory as a concept:
Yes, much of economics is oversimplified to the point that all actors are assumed to be perfectly rational with perfect information.
Game theory is specifically extremely useful to counter this obviously false assumption.
Game theory excels in giving you the ability to model more realistic, actual kinds of decisions that actors actually make… because it is specifically very useful in modelling how different actors with different levels of different information actually act.
This can be used in more comprehensive economic models, and the result is often a much more accurate to real world representation of how people and companies and governments actually act, as compared to the oversimplified economic models where perfect information is just assumed.
I’m not an expert, but I’ve read some and played around with it, and the work required to make it not-bullshit are basically never used by it’s advocates. It’s sort of in the same category as large (thing) models; an expensive but useful niche tool that does more damage with its misuse than it could ever provide in value
Economics is closer to theology than physics as an intellectual discipline. Its power is proportional to the belief it commands.
Finance is an arbitrary subset of mathematics, cherry picked by the owning class, and applied as their supporting mythology.
It’s entirely imaginary, which means alternatives are only ever a conjuring away.
Person with degree in Econ here:
Ah, yep. This is correct.
Our theologies tend to have more numbers than most religions, but most economic ‘schools of thought’ pretty much are just warring religious sects, the dynamics are quite similar.
That being said, I am speaking of the kinds of ‘economics’ the vast majority of people will ever hear about, due to how at least in the US, we mostly only popularize and give media time to what Academic Economists largely consider to be idiot crank fraud propogandists.
There are some actually good modern Academic Economists who you’ll hear from or about, from time to time, and they often are highly respected and credible because they have the capacity to consider the varying ideological/religious flavors of economic sects, and pick the parts of each of them that seem to actually be well evidenced, and make functional/causal sense, without discontinuity or contradiction.
Like uh, I myself can tell you that I find a lot of Marxist economics to be compelling and accurate, but, some of its proposed exact ideas on how prices and pricing work… are problematic.
Conversely, while I find the vast majority of Austrian economics to be voodoo bullshit, I do think they have at least a core framework of how to approach some dynamics in monetary policies that actually do track with reality better than most other economic ‘schools’, such as MMT.
What I mean is that they tend to pay way, way more attention to the different uh, levels, or kinds of money, and how they circulate around and interact with things like bond markets and interest rates, and from this you can get a more holistic picture of the actual state and behavior of monetary and financial systems… whereas a lot of other economists just hsnd wave away that complexity, and then come up with more ad hoc explanations for things that a sort of Austrian-derived monetary view can give you some useful predictive indicators from.
And, just to clarify, I am not an academic myself, just got to a specialization in econometrics and then went to work as a data analyst / ‘scientist’.
(I always found the job description of ‘data scientisr’ to be largely a misnomer, we’re basically just a flavor of statisticians? but sure, we are a scientist because boomers think knowing how to do stats on a computer is ‘science’? like we are… discovering new truths about the world???)
I’d say if you want a crash course in some non bullshit modern economics, check out uh, Richard Wolfe, Joseph Stiglitz, Yannis Varoufakis, Robert Reich.
Also, check out Paul Samuelson, who in his time did actuslly strongly push for using more robust and complex math (for economists, anyway) by borrowing from physics.
Oh right and we cannot forget the Beautiful Mind himself, John Nash, who also did a lot of serious, basically genius level math, and more or less made Game Theory into a massively useful and applicable framework for evaluating how and why agents make which choices in basically any definable scenario.
Really, he is a mathematician, not primarily an economist, but I at least find Game Theory to be a fundamentally necesarry tool in any serious economist’s toolkit, and Nash did win an Economics Nobel.
I can’t stand Wolfe for some reason and I’ve never seen any type of rigor from him. I read his “Democracy at Work” book, and he came up with the term “worker self-directed enterprises,” and kinda presented it as a novel concept when they were pretty much just another name for worker cooperatives. I’ve always liked Krugman’s articles/blog because he does get a little “wonkish” sometimes; I think he’s considered “New Keynesian” or something like that. Varoufakis and Reich are cool. Oh, there’s a youtuber I recently found, “Garys Economics,” which is pretty good (though he’s an ex-finance guy, not an economist).
Yeah this is kinda what I mean about Marxist economists: Broad strokes, high level, followable narrative that jives with overall aggregate data, often emphasizes important dynamics that others just totally do not mention, or garble-explain with technobabble?
Yes, good, generally very insightful and accurate in many ways.
But, when you go down to the nitty gritty level… it either just isn’t there, or is pretty clearly just wrong.
Like I’m sorry, but you can’t build a microeconomics based off of only the labor theory of value, it just does not work.
You can use it in certain situations where it becomes a reasonable approximation, but it is far from comprehensive.
And yes, I also find Krugman to be insufferably wonkish, I also still hate him for basically going along with bailing out the banks in the 08 GFC, instead of fucking jailing their execs and/or at least temporarily nationalizing them.
And and, Gary’s Economics is also generally good, though I haven’t seen too much of his stuff.
Economics nobel isn’t real.
Game theory rarely stands up to everyday activity or population level moves.
Game Theory is actually widely practical and useful if you actually have extensive formal training in all of its variations wnd complexities, and know how to use it properly.
Game Theory is a lot, lot more than just ‘the prisoners dilemma’.
And yes, the Economics Nobel technically isn’t a real Nobel, but also, the whole theme here is that Economics behaves much like a religion, and many/most economists and just general people treat it as if it is extremely meaningful.
To make this even more meta:
You can at least broadly model that with Game Theory, if you take into account a robust model of imperfect information, and how the transmission of information (or lack thereof) alters the preferences, ‘beliefs’, and thus decision making of actors in a connected system.
EDIT:
Anyway, the point of me mentioning Nash and his Econ Nobel is to illustrate that a lot of serious economists also find his work to be extremely important and relevant to economics.
This part i do not disagree with. They’re the priestly caste of capital.
Sure, but not for the ones i said-everyday behavior and population level shit. I did specify.
Yeah, totally.
Sigh.
Again, most actual serious, modern academic economists will tell you that no one in power actually listens to them, the powerful just pick idiot cranks with an Econ degree like Art Laffer to justify their ridiculous policies.
Its more complicated than you are simplifying it to.
…
Also, no, you did not specify anything about what you meant irt game theory applications.
You said it isn’t applicable to broad populations and everday activity, and I said it is broadly applicable to many things… which would include what you say it doesn’t cover.
A rather well known, other cross domain use of game theory is to explain the popularity of different mating strategie of various animals.
You can use similar models and apply them to humans, and it works well also.
…
Finally, your last point in particular reveals your total ignorance of game theory as a concept:
Yes, much of economics is oversimplified to the point that all actors are assumed to be perfectly rational with perfect information.
Game theory is specifically extremely useful to counter this obviously false assumption.
Game theory excels in giving you the ability to model more realistic, actual kinds of decisions that actors actually make… because it is specifically very useful in modelling how different actors with different levels of different information actually act.
This can be used in more comprehensive economic models, and the result is often a much more accurate to real world representation of how people and companies and governments actually act, as compared to the oversimplified economic models where perfect information is just assumed.
Shit, whoops. Meant to. Have now.
Yeah, economics
I’m not an expert, but I’ve read some and played around with it, and the work required to make it not-bullshit are basically never used by it’s advocates. It’s sort of in the same category as large (thing) models; an expensive but useful niche tool that does more damage with its misuse than it could ever provide in value