So you fucking think fry cooks don't deserve a higher minimum wage?

[Mesozoic Mister Nigel]

The ones that do good science aren't  the ones you hear from, because they aren't the ones who tell people with money what they want to hear.

That's my hypothesis, anyway.

I'm unsure how you could make a proper science out of it, on account of the fact that finance is always riddled with people gaming the system.  You can't game physics or chemistry¹, because it either IS or it ISN'T, unless you're talking about that fucking cat. 

I think economics as an approach is barking up the wrong tree.  To understand economics, you have to understand humans, and that means psychology and neuroscience.  Economics isn't a "natural" force as far as I can tell.  It seems to be a behavior.



¹ Does not apply in Tucson or downtown Portland.

Yes, economics is a behavioral science, like sociology and psychology.

It is not finance.

[Mesozoic Mister Nigel]

This might be helpful:

http://www.digitaleconomist.org/economics.html

Economics examines human social behavior as it pertains to resource allocation. That's all it is. Like psychology, it tends to suffer from fragmentation into different camps or schools of thought; for some reason, unlike anthropology and sociology, neither field has yet figured out how to work holistically for the betterment of the science. However, they can't stay in the 20th century forever.

[Rev Thwack]

I've got a hard time calling economics a science. If we say something is a science, we're giving the impression that it follows the scientific method. Economics seems to miss out on the whole section of analyzing results to see if the hypothesis held up. I mean, you still hear economists arguing for trickle down economics.

[Mesozoic Mister Nigel]

I've got a hard time calling economics a science. If we say something is a science, we're giving the impression that it follows the scientific method. Economics seems to miss out on the whole section of analyzing results to see if the hypothesis held up. I mean, you still hear economists arguing for trickle down economics.

Yes, but we've already established that everything you know about the field, you have picked up through political coverage through the media, which means that you don't actually know what economics is and are not qualified to comment meaningfully on it.

You can bloviate, but until you know what it is, your opinions are meaningless. But look! You have this amazing tool, right under your very fingertips! What could it be? How could you use it to learn something, to inform your opinion before spouting it?

We just don't know. It's a mystery.

[Cain]

Sure economics uses scientific methods.  The tools in economics are pretty much the tools that the rest of the social sciences use and in many respects economics leads the other social sciences because the object of its study is more easily quantifiable.

Just because it cannot give scientifically accurate answers in the sense of physics or chemistry has a lot more to do with the social sciences as a whole, and the ability to account for all factors, run rigourous testing (which in many cases can be unethical) and gather relevant data than it is that economics is uniquely terrible.

[Rev Thwack]

I've got a hard time calling economics a science. If we say something is a science, we're giving the impression that it follows the scientific method. Economics seems to miss out on the whole section of analyzing results to see if the hypothesis held up. I mean, you still hear economists arguing for trickle down economics.

Yes, but we've already established that everything you know about the field, you have picked up through political coverage through the media, which means that you don't actually know what economics is and are not qualified to comment meaningfully on it.

You can bloviate, but until you know what it is, your opinions are meaningless. But look! You have this amazing tool, right under your very fingertips! What could it be? How could you use it to learn something, to inform your opinion before spouting it?

We just don't know. It's a mystery.

No, you've assumed that my knowledge of economics comes from mass media, but nothing of the sort has been established. Instead, you've demonstrated a willingness to draw conclusions without a solid basis and to act like you understand something you have no direct knowledge of.

[Demolition Squid]

Pickety's 'Capital in the 21st Century' is a good example of economics as social science in my opinion.

He draws purely on historical evidence and statistics, and explains his reasoning every step of the way. It IS a political book, because it is a book not a paper and he makes it explicit at the start that he is against inequality and the whole book is an analysis of inequality as it has existed through the ages and what conditions have led to less of it.

It also points out that the system is rigged and provides some practical steps as to how this could be addressed based on the statistical evidence - but as the way to address it can be summarized as 'tax people based on their assets not their earnings' that will never happen.

ETA - In case it wasn't clear, I mean it is a political book in the sense that rather than just saying 'this is what it is' he also makes an argument in a lot of cases that inequality is morally wrong and therefore steps should be taken to reduce it - and he makes the argument in emotional rather than scientific terms. You wouldn't see that in a harder science - like a psychiatric textbook - but then, I don't know if psychiatrists ever had to make the case that disorders are undesirable and should be cured where possible, which seems like the obvious comparison here.

I think you mean psychology textbook, because psychiatry is the psychological specialty in medicine.

Psychology is a social or "soft" science, like economics.

You do see arguments like that in psychology. Not generally in textbooks, but I also don't think that the book you're talking about is a textbook.

Yeah, I meant psychology - sorry, that's what I get for posting before I'm actually awake. I just don't know jack about psychology apparently. :P

Capital in the 21st Century isn't a textbook, though, yeah. It is written with readability in mind. ... To a degree. It mostly comes across as a very angry statistics professor who is irritated that nobody else seems to have bothered to actually look at what they've been talking about for the past two hundred or so years.

He also makes the fatal mistake of crediting Marx with being the starting point for much of his analysis, though, which is a second tick in the 'pay no attention' column as far as a lot of people are concerned.

He does frame his theory in scientific terms, though. He goes back over all the available data, looks at what was done and why, and how that impacted growth and inequality between the top and bottom percentiles in society. The trouble is, as an economist, he can't isolate his phenomenon, he can't control it he has to rely on what large economic actors (mostly governments, some families/corporations) do and the timescales is decades.

That all makes it hard to experiment in a traditional scientific way, but it isn't as though he tosses out examples where they don't fit. He's just shifted his analysis accordingly and looked at everything he can get his hands on since taxation records began, then analysed what happened at peaks and troughs and so forth. That's definitely 'science' to me. I was often reminded of climate change studies whilst reading it, actually - how temperature rises and falls over centuries and why that is . When the phenomena you're looking at are that big, you can't really 'retest' you can only use the data you're able to collect; that doesn't make the science any less valid.

[Doktor Howl]

Thwack beat me to it.

[Doktor Howl]

The ones that do good science aren't  the ones you hear from, because they aren't the ones who tell people with money what they want to hear.

That's my hypothesis, anyway.

I'm unsure how you could make a proper science out of it, on account of the fact that finance is always riddled with people gaming the system.  You can't game physics or chemistry¹, because it either IS or it ISN'T, unless you're talking about that fucking cat. 

I think economics as an approach is barking up the wrong tree.  To understand economics, you have to understand humans, and that means psychology and neuroscience.  Economics isn't a "natural" force as far as I can tell.  It seems to be a behavior.



¹ Does not apply in Tucson or downtown Portland.

Yes, economics is a behavioral science, like sociology and psychology.

It is not finance.

Oki doke.  All I know is that I've looked up that damn graph dealing with minimum wage vs inflation a billion times while talking to libertarians and other moral sinks.

So that part I know.  The rest was opinion based on casual observation.

[Reginald Ret]

Pickety's 'Capital in the 21st Century' is a good example of economics as social science in my opinion.

Nifty, added to reading list.

[LMNO]

All I know is that a few people calling themselves Economists made some models and predicted in advance how the economy would behave under certain scenarios, like austerity measures in a liquidity trap. 

The economy behaved as was predicted.  That, for the most part, leads me to think someone knows what they're doing sometimes.

Now, there are other people calling themselves Economists who made theories, and then backed it up with some models, and made predictions, and were wrong.  However, they did not go back and adjust their models to make sense of what happened, but instead doubled down on their theories. 

That, for the most part, leads me to think someone has no idea what they're doing most of the time.

[The Johnny]

Now im confused because there are two threads but, someone mentioned meteorology, and its a good example; just because you can describe something in a scientific manner does not equate with the ability to predict an outcome and that does not make it any less scientific, theres simply far too many volatile factors to take into account.

As some of you know, I'm a psychologist, and most of the time we work based on triangulation of factors to make diagnosis and treatment which is a constant process because the subject is in perpetual flow.

And well, thru a quick look at wikipedia, theres positive and theres normative economics, separating what "is" from "what ought be", so theres that too.

If anything, ive gotten from these discussions that some people blindly hate economists and its blurring their judgement about an entire field.

[LMNO]

The amount of variable is enormous, you're right, so specific predictions ("The market will go up 357 points at 10:07 AM") are impossible.

But so long as you have enough information (which itself is a problem: economists correctly predicted the housing bubble, but the shadow markets built around subprime mortgages weren't revealed until everything began falling apart, meaning no one was able to predict how bad it was going to get), you can make reasonable predictions about how the market will behave, so long as you continue to update your priors.

[Rev Thwack]

It's not the inability to predict results that people here are knocking economists on, but the seemingly unwillingness to update their theories based upon experiments that give results contrary to what was predicted.

[LMNO]

Well, until people start making specific references, it's just another "All X are Y" argument.

I've already given one person who calls themselves an economist who updates their models based upon reality.

I can also name several who don't, and yes, they tend to get the most amount of press, but that doesn't make it the fault of economics.

It's discrediting physics because of the people who go around saying "the observer creates the universe".