Stop using this abusive, fascist sycophant as a meme template.
Damn right. Fuck Crowder. Abusive spouse, sexually abusive co-worker.
Never even knew the original. What was it?
First you would have to find someone who thought economics were closer to physics.
No, at least someone who graduated kindergarden.
Theres an interesting book on it, literally “Physics of wall street”. Or that was the literal name translated from my language. It explored the similarities between the two, can recommend.
Thanks, looks like an interesting book. Looks like he also wrote on misinformation.
At least psychology is mostly experimental, whereas economics isn’t. I’d say economics is closer to sociology.
I agree.
Economics, sociology and political science are the trifecta of sciences that cover human societies, rather than human individuals.
Psychology is closer to medicine. It is complex and unpredictable, because humans are complex and unpredictable, but they approach the subject empirically and can actually achieve consistentcy. For example, we are getting really good at helping people with PTSS, ADHD, Autism, learning difficulties, etc.
I would say economics, sociology and political science are at the lowest rung on the “certainty” totempole. These sciences are forever stuck in the “we don’t know what we don’t know, so we are driving blind” mode of operation. They only succeed in analysing and narrating what happened after the fact. At best, they prevent us from repeating some mistakes in the most obvious ways. But they also enable us to repeat old mistakes in novel ways.
The only reason people confuse economics with the hard sciences, is because it has a Nobel prize.
But it really should be seen as an equivalent to the Nobel peace and literature prizes, in a separate league of the physics, medicine and chemistry ones.
Even economists themselves call their science the dismal science.
All this said, Economists are true and capable scientists (well, some are corrupt and biased, but some doctors are, too. That’s not an indictment of the whole field).
Their subject is just difficult to analyze.
I mean, define experimental?
Daniel Kahneman won the 2002 Nobel prize in economics for his research on the psychology of judgement and decision making, which drives our economic models. He’s a psychologist.
Any definition of experimental that fits psychology will fit economics.
Sociology is an actual science with a methodology and it tries to learn from other sciences.
Economy considers it pure like maths despite the evidences it is not the case.
Economy is pseudo-science at its best.
Economy` is pseudo-science at its best.
This sentence doesn’t even make sense.
Econometrics is highly research driven and evidence based. In it’s simplest form econometrics says if you put prices down you will (usually) sell more of your product. You’d dismiss this observation as pseudo-science?
That’s dubious. Considering that economists deliberately ignore strong established psychological theories to make theirs work. Economical theory also runs contrary to a lot of established notions of sociology. Economics is closer to politics than to any science.
Economists are there to perform the job that Theology departments used to do: provide a mystical moral justification of whatever the assholes in charge want to do to everybody else.
Economics is an extremely broad field, encompassing things that are closely related to psychology (e.g. behavioral economics), and things that are related to physics and natural science (e.g ecological economics), as well as pure mathematics (e.g. game theory) so trying to say it has more in common with one than the other is kind of a vacuous statement or category error.
To those who are angry at normative claims and policy prescriptions from the economic orthodoxy/zeitgeist, I understand your frustration. I would say what you’re angry at is not economics itself (which is simply the study of scarcity and related human behavior) but economics done badly. Such as the Chicago school.
Setting aside the emotional baggage related to these issues, there are some really beautiful and fascinating topics in economics that borrow very directly from statistical physics in the analysis of financial time series data (and also apply to a wide variety of fields like network traffic, the distribution of metals in ore, turbulent flows in fluid dynamics, and the distribution of galaxies in space), originally identified by Benoit Mandelbrot.
It’s crazy how much people will vehemently defend a position with little to no knowledge of the subject. It’s easy to just pin it on the dunning-kruger effect, but in this case I think it’s definitely tied to how much people despise economists. Which I find kinda funny since it’s like getting angry at the weatherman for bad weather.
Also, are there any communities dedicated to actually discussing economics? I’d really like to spitball actual solutions to a shitty economy rather than the wishful thinking capitalists & communists rely on.
I can sympathize with them, as the way economic thought is portrayed in popular journalism makes it seem like ivory tower eggheads concocting overly-mathematized models to support bad policies. And I do believe there is some truth to this, with bad economists hiding shitty ideas behind the veneer of respectability that math provides. Science and technology are almost fetishized in our culture, especially by those who don’t really study them academically, and I believe disingenuous economists and politicians use this fact to their advantage.
What they must realize is that whatever flaws they might identify to overhaul these bad economic models leads to… more economics! Hopefully better economics. But they’re still participating in the field known as economics.
For instance, noting that the “homo economicus” doesn’t exist IRL isn’t really the gotcha that many people think it is. Rather, anybody doing economics properly is acutely aware of this fact, and is just exploring the limits of what such a simplifying assumption can yield. E.g. a surprisingly large mileage from the very parsimonious axioms of utility given by Von Neumann and Morgenstern. The really interesting and difficult part is thinking about how and why real life data deviates from the predictions made by the simple assumptions.
Making such reasonable and well thought comments under the name “Prager U” should be a crime.
Behavioral economics was my favorite and I’d say it’s tied closely to game at its core, they’re both trying to predict human choices game theory just tries to quantify it with math. None of it is “pure math” it’s all theory with math attempting to support it. It’s only in like the last 100 years math even came into economic theory. I always enjoyed reading theory from the less recent economists (before they were even called economists) because it’s more pure theory/philosophy.
Wait, do people actually disagree with this? I thought this was just common knowledge.
Ignoring the shitty history of that meme:
Economics is definitely a social science. Even the most business-bro economist would agree.
But I would actually argue it is closer to physics than philosophy*. At the macroeconomics scale, there are very solid trends and predictions to be made with very solid hypotheses as to why they occur. And in a small town, you can generally get away with a lot of the higher level aspects of microeconomics and make solid predictions. Gas stations thrive on this shit. But high frequency trading, as well as sites that let individuals buy whatever stocks they want, really do narrow the region that can actually be considered either one and instead we are looking at having to apply “micro” concepts across entire countries worth of people.
Which… is physics. Drop a ball from a platform? You can math out when it will hit the ground to the nearest second pretty easily. Want to go milliseconds? Now you probably need to take into account air resistance, but you can probably do that with some not overly complex simulations and wind tunnel experiments. But as the height increases and you start putting a rocket engine on the back of that device, just doing a fluid mechanics simulation in your CAD program of choice stops being viable and you start needing to consider the underlying material properties and possibly even doing molecular dynamics simulations under the hood.
And… that is kind of where we are with economics. We have the high level math and simulations. Newton’s Three Laws have been discovered and people can get a long way. But nobody really understands the underlying causes well enough to find the economic equivalent of the Theory of Relativity. And nobody has figured out how to run simulations that can take into account… still only a subset of the variables at play.
Personally? I supported a decent number of simulations of population movement and the like as part of the covid efforts. I strongly suspect there is some underlying “science of why humans do the shit we do” that nobody has properly codified yet, and Economics is a subset of that. Because the more you look beyond ECON 101 level concepts, the more it is clear that there IS strong logic underneath and that a lot of “predictions based on trends” are very much “I predict that if we kick the ball at this angle with this much force, it will go that distance” levels of science. But there are so many factors involved that nobody understand how to account for.
*: Going by the modern definition rather than the historic one where most hard sciences were wrapped up in philosophy. One of the reasons we have “Doctorate of Philosophy” for physics and the like. … Which also speaks to how naive this post is
We’ve had 3 “once in a lifetime” financial meltdowns in like 25 years now.
Our banks need bailing out like every 10 years.
The arrogance of thinking that we’ve figured out the economy even in the Newtonian sense is part of why, I think.
Like, I hear you, but at the same time it just doesn’t align with even the broadest observations.
And when a theory doesn’t align with observed data, I have to be critical of the theory…
I’m interested in if you can expand your explanation to account for it, though. It’s super low stakes and I don’t think it’s really possible to prove any of it so I think it’s a great subject for thought experiments.
You’re making the mistake of thinking of this from the perspective of an end user. By the time you or I see anything, we have already done all economically viable simulations and are using the only approximations that “make sense” to use.
That does not at all mean that the people running those sims even think it will work. That means that the same report saying “Look, this might work if we get really lucky and none of these four hundred events that we can’t account for occurs” that execs then ignored because they either don’t understand or, understand well enough to know there is nothing that can be done.
Which is the other side of this. So much of modern physics and engineering is proprietary for corporate reasons. If Hyundai suddenly were to gain some new understanding of material science, they are going to exploit that. And the same is true where fundamental flaws in car/whatever designs are often treated as “How can people be so stupid and irresponsible as to do this” rather than… pretty much anyone with an understanding of the underlying math saying “So glad we didn’t try and do that”.
As for Newton’s Laws: Understand that, even though we call them “laws”, they are still theories. It is incredibly unlikely that we discover some new concept that flips our understanding of the world on its head and we discover that an object in motion will actually accelerate on its own if you get it to the exact right speed and THEN paint it red, but there are enough unknowns that we STILL can’t rule that out entirely. We can rule it out to the point that we would laugh at anyone suggesting otherwise… but would probably check their math if they suddenly had a proof.
Like, let’s look at one of those laws: The simplified verison is that an object in motion will stay in motion unless acted upon by an outside force. Now, we are all smart enough to understand that those outside forces include things like gravity, friction on the ground, and even friction from the air. But as you increase the speeds at which objects are moving, you suddenly have a LOT more factors to take into account where, depending on the math, even radiation can become an “outside force” to slowly (over millenia, if memory serves) slow down an object (take that one with a grain of salt as I forget if that has been “proven” yet or if the argument is that it is still just the particles themselves causing the deceleration or not).
I STRONGLY encourage people go out for drinks with scientists if you ever have the chance. Not grad students and professors (although, many do think of the same problems) but the engineers who work for companies and think tanks and government labs. You will RAPIDLY reach the point of “I have no fucking idea why it does that but the database says I substitute a ‘4’ for this property and stuff mostly works.”. You might even get lucky and someone will go on a rant about how the entire field are idiots for not listening to them because approximation X is actually a fundamentally flawed one and under very specific circumstances it will fail so that dipshit in management better give them a raise".
But yeah. People very much overestimate how much “science” has its shit together. We are mostly bouncing around and making informed hypotheses on what would and would not work. We just have the advantage of most of what we do costing so much money and requiring so many people that it is “safe but slow” to advance. Although… read some stories about the early atomic weapons programs around the world if you want to have trouble sleeping. And some of that is very much because: Good science reporting ignores that. It presents “theories” as “fact”. Because people are stupid. And saying “We believe your car will not spontaneously melt” is actively harmful. Whereas “Your car won’t melt and the battery is contained to the point that the passenger cabin is safe to the extent of all of our testing”
Whereas economics? They don’t have the luxury to not do something. People are going to buy and sell widgets regardless and you either get in on the widget trading or you might as well not exist. So you work to the extent you can and cross your fingers it works out. Which… is a lot like the early pioneers of flight. We love the Wright Brothers but a LOT of people died because their math was wrong or they didn’t understand a concept and the Wrights very much benefited from past experiments.
Steven Crowder is an assclown.
Pretty sure this isn’t that controversial of an opinion. Pretty sure any economist that disagrees with you is a shit economist. There’s a reason there’s a related field called “socioeconomics”
Also fuck this meme format. Stop using this facist for memes.
Hey come on now, don’t insult psychology by comparing it to economics.
Exam questions are the same every year. But the answers are different.
It’s a branch of sociology dominated by people who refuse to accept sociological research practices in the name of deluding themselves that they’re uncovering grand truths about the universe. It would be hilarious and sad if politicians and journalists didn’t listen to them.
The invisible hand is just bullshit and prices in our economy are often centrally planned by a monopoly or a cartel that decides how an industry ought to set prices.
Current day Economics is just propoganda.
the number of comments here who use hard sciences’ criteria as the ones and only defining the validity of knowledge is concerning. Human sciences don’t have the same foundations, methodologies, etc. as harde sciences, they don’t have the same system of validation either, which doesn’t mean it’s less valid.
Economy is pseudo-science. Change my mind.
