When I studied economics in high school my mum always emphasized that the assumption that people acted rationally was really fucking stupid
Acting Rationally isn’t the same as Acting Perfectly
For instance, running across the street to get out of the rain is rational. But you can still fall through an open manhole or get hit by a speeding car you didn’t notice.
Cool. People don’t reliably act rationally, though.
People do, practically by construction of the term. Rationality is the social norm. Irrationality is typically defined as some variant of mental disorder.
Rational patterns of behavior are critical to an individual’s health and well-being. They’re also patterns that can be observed, extrapolated, and exploited. So you’ll often see an individualistic rational action (for instance, fleeing from danger) manipulated by a malicious actor (for instance, someone shouting “Fire!” in a crowded theater) in order to achieve a large scale negative result (a stampede or crowd crush).
You can point to a crowd crush and conclude “Everyone in that crowd was irrational” when no single individual did anything at any given moment that didn’t make sense from their point of view.
And even if everyone did act rationally we have so many examples where that still doesn’t lead to the optimal outcome.
That said, economics is still a science. A field can have flaws and still be considered science
Economics, as an intellectual discipline, is far closer to theology than physics.
Asking an economist for advice is akin to asking a priest.
Yep!
Economics is a valid area of study, after all everyone loves money and needs some. Things work better for everyone when it is moving around optimally.
But money also buys opinions from feckless nerds. Thus the entire ‘science’ of economics as the public sees it is much more akin to a company paying a consultant to come in to deliver bad news about needed layoffs. It is pure theatre to deflect ire away from the real reasons.
Can confirm.
But DAMN, will they make the case that we’re correct AF while hedging and saying “well, it depends…” half the time.
Depends on who you ask. There are economists who actually go through all the data and are the ones who can provide sources and examples and there are the ones who go “trust me bro the companies love and care about you and totally listen to your opinions bro please the free market will protect you and you totally have power pleeeeeeease bro”.
How is this any different to the various incarnations of priests? Economists interpret budgets as if they’re dregs of tea leaves, and unemployment statistics like the entrails of a sacrificial animal.
It doesn’t matter how rigorously someone analyses scripture, the end result can only ever intersect with reality by accident.
Yeah, scientists do that too, as a geologist, the hardest of hard sciences pun very much intended
We look at crystals like the dregs of tea leaves and isotope ratios like they’re the entrails of a sacrificed animal.
As a common heard saying on mines, 3 geologists will have 4 opinions
The difference is that economics is a social science, masquerading as a hard science. Nothing wrong with the social sciences but they often present themselves as though the results they’ve found are akin to a hard science experiment with the lowest R values on record. In fact, ironically, most economists tend to look down their noses at the other social sciences and I think it’s causing them a lot of dukkha.
Ironically, it’s the social sciences that would help them realise that their discipline was already enough, as it was, all along.
The real problem came when neoclassical economics was rebranded as “just basic economics!” and not one of many conflicting, equally supported, schools of thought.
My study presented economics as a soft science, so I’m not sure where you’re coming from.
Of course it’s a social science, but even those use experiments and the scientific method, or do you also think sociology and psychology are bullshit?
STEM people are the ones always looking down on every other discipline, you’re the case in point.
When did I say that any of them were bullshit? Can you not make up things i didn’t say and then argue against that instead please?
I literally said that the subject was already good enough, as it was. How did you miss that?
The difference is that economics is a social science, masquerading as a hard science. Nothing wrong with the social sciences but they often present themselves as though the results they’ve found are akin to a hard science experiment with the lowest R values on record. In fact, ironically, most economists tend to look down their noses at the other social sciences and I think it’s causing them a lot of dukkha.
This entire paragraph was really telling.
there are the ones who go “trust me bro the companies love and care about you and totally listen to your opinions bro please the free market will protect you and you totally have power pleeeeeeease bro”.
Those people are influencers, not economists.
Why would I call an ambulance? If it made sense for it to come it would already be here
As much as Milton Friedman makes bloody sense, his ideas are what led us to the neoliberal hellhole and eventually to fascism. His motto “greed is good” enabled excessive individualism and fawning of private property, leading to selfishness at the expense of the common good.
Improving and maintaining the common good is as beneficial as economic self-interest. The CEOs would not be where they are had they not benefited from the labour of others and resources from nature.
The free market will save him.
Oh fuck, that one made me laugh audibly enough to scare the dog.
This meme is like having a PsychD diagnosing the heart attack victim with an Oedipus complex. It’s supposed to be an exaggerated jab at economics as a science but even under the irony betrays zero knowledge of real economics. It is a science, but it makes you feel better if you can pretend it’s all a sham in the same way every other pathetic anti-science dipshit does. But don’t take my word for it; take the word of this PLoS One article exploring excessive positive results in science papers:
these results support the scientific status of the social sciences [such as psychology, sociology, economics] against claims that they are completely subjective, by showing that, when they adopt a scientific approach to discovery, they differ from the natural sciences only by a matter of degree.
Cope harder. —A leftist
Economics is absolutely a valid field of study.
Economists are also mostly employed to serve the interests of the rich. They are a primary source of the useless metrics we hear on the news that truly reflect only the experience and interest of those who have enough money to respond to that info.
There are many other methods developed by non-shill economists that we never hear about unless one goes digging into more obscure academic literature.
The Gini coefficient is one example. It is a perfectly valid way of framing and interpreting economic data, but one almost never sees it in popular media. Why?
The people that buy economists and media don’t even want to have the conversation about income inequality.
So, yes, economics is a valid area of study that has some valid methods.
Also, most economists are intellectually dishonest and compromised shills for entrenched wealth.
Two things can be true at the same time.
Ehh, that feels like a stretch. This is a valid, if potentially outdated critique that is commonly acknowledged in the field. I could see my old Econ professor hanging this meme outside her office.
Of course I wouldn’t be making this comment if this were just a harmless, trite Homo economicus joke without the subtitle
Economic "science". But just like making a joke about recapitulation theory, the second you make that joke and addEvolution "science"after it, you’ve gone from a lighthearted jab into science denial backed by a puddle-deep understanding of the field.deleted by creator
In college I participated in an economic experiment where everyone in the class had a laptop, and we went through trials with different variations of “keep $2 or give everyone else $1”. The payout was $20 to whoever had the highest total at the end, everyone else got nothing. I kept the money every time until the end and won.
Afterwards the Economics professor called me to the front and started in with “See, this person proves that people act in their own self interest.” and I had to say “Well if you actually gave them the money when I picked ‘donate’, like the original experiment called for, I would have done that.” The professor and his assistant were not happy.
The title of the post aside, I think the meme itself touches on something real in some people. Although I do think economics is an actual science, unlike some of the people in the comments comparing it to homeopathy or scientology.
Tbf most “economists” you might run into are online. And they often still subscribe to schools of thought that the discipline has left behind. They hold on to them for political reasons making them the antivax/flat earth of economics of sorts
Yeah, a system can be extensively studied and understood even if it’s a bad system.
I’d happily see the Œdipus complex meme. Psychologists deserve to be endlessly clowned on as long as Freudian theory keeps getting taught and practiced by licensed professionals instead of being relegated to the history of the sciences alongside bloodletting and humors theory.
Academic fields are collectively responsible for these actively harmful ideas (psychoanalysis and homo economicus) being continuously propagated by ill-intentioned or incompetent academics. I don’t care that these theories are now “widely considered outdated” or whatever the fuck, proponents of this quackery are actively giving interviews and teaching classes and no-one in their field is seriously considering stripping them of their credentials. That’s more than enough justification for the mockery.
I feel like this is incredibly misleading to clip out of the abstract when just above it we have:
If the hierarchy hypothesis is correct, then researchers in “softer” sciences should have fewer constraints to their conscious and unconscious biases, and therefore report more positive outcomes. Results confirmed the predictions at all levels considered: discipline, domain and methodology broadly defined. Controlling for observed differences between pure and applied disciplines, and between papers testing one or several hypotheses, the odds of reporting a positive result were around 5 times higher among papers in the disciplines of Psychology and Psychiatry and Economics and Business compared to Space Science, 2.3 times higher in the domain of social sciences compared to the physical sciences, and 3.4 times higher in studies applying behavioural and social methodologies on people compared to physical and chemical studies on non-biological material. In all comparisons, biological studies had intermediate values. These results suggest that the nature of hypotheses tested and the logical and methodological rigour employed to test them vary systematically across disciplines and fields, depending on the complexity of the subject matter and possibly other factors (e.g., a field’s level of historical and/or intellectual development). On the other hand,
To clip the quote just after the statement “on the other hand” to give the definitive conclusion of the paper is pretty wack. Like the paper is literally titled “Positive” Results Increase Down the Hierarchy of the Sciences
Further I think this meme isn’t about the fact that it’s literally impossible to do economics, or that there is nothing worth studying in markets. More that the orthodoxy and biases of economics muddy the field to the point of dishonesty, shown here as being 5 times more likely to be right when you can massage the factors compared to telescope data.
Yes, it’s very disingenuous to take the quote the abstract concludes on which plainly supports the social sciences as true scientific fields, contrary to what the OP implies through scare quotes.
By the way, here’s the full chart since you’re so worried about taking things “out of context”:
I guess economics is just a more robust field of science than biochem, pharmacology, clinical medicine, materials science, and psych, because that’s totally what the data means. I am very smart™.
You’re bring a lot of energy that suggest to me this is a particular bone you have to pick. I agree econ can be a science. Sadly this meme doesn’t dive into the sociological foundations that validate the possibility of a hypothetical world where econ is done properly and can become a science along side other social sciences; choosing instead to just critique the absurdity of economics as it is currently exists.
I guess economics is just a more robust field of science than biochem, pharmacology, clinical medicine, materials science, and psych, because that’s totally what the data means.
I think there are other issues with the paper that make me hesitant to take it’s conclusions at face value.
Most people making fun of economics as a science wouldn’t last a year into a BSc of it.
I’ve seen first year Econ questions, it was such basic maths I genuinely thought it was fake
Undergrad Econ is a bit of a joke.
Post graduate Econ is considered one of the hardest degrees, and used to have one of the highest salaries upon graduation.
Those cancerous recommendation algorithms that are the result of optimising millions of live A/B tests? Designed and constructed by Econ PhDs.
I understand that, and that it’s from your personal experience so I’m definitely not trying to minimise or invalidate your experience.
However I feel obligated to ask if that was a business econ or scientific economics course. My Macro 1 and Micro 1 courses were brutal in the first year. The math was not easy. So much so that about 20% only passed the first year macro 1 course, we had to start a petition to adjust people’s grades because of how brutal that pass rate had been…
I’m not saying you’re wrong, I’m saying you might be thinking of a different discipline.
Business Econ is a joke, it is where people go if they want managerial skills and to enter the rat race. Econ as a science is all about policymaking, behavioural economics empirical studies, data science methods, econometrics, maximisation and minimisation… Even linear algebra was included.
It was as a science, but I think it’s probably a difference in perspective. I studied maths so saying linear algebra as the most difficult part kinda proves my point in my mind.
Okay. That’s slightly skewed for sure…
I wouldn’t last a year into a homeopathy BSc, does that mean water has memory?
if water has memory, and I’m 70% water, why the fuck do I forget everything all the time?
It’s the 30% that isn’t water fucking things up, that’s the toxins
Doctor, this man is dying! Put him in the reverse osmosis machine, stat!
There is no homeopathy BSc as it is not a science. Science actively denies homeopathy as a medical field because of its unproven claims and lack of foundation in reality.
Meanwhile there are entire fields of economics that literally use quantifiable and empirical data to come to conclusions.
The fact that you’ve never opened an Economics book or studied it beyond “business 101” or something does not in any way prove any of what you’re claiming about the scientific field of economics.
I’m sure there are entire studies about why homeopathy works. What’s your point? That economists are better liars than homeopaths?
Economics should be viewed like history: as an after-the-fact study, not some form of prediction model. Meaning, not a science, as it is by definition non reproducible (until we invent a time machine). Seen from this angle, I think economics is a quite interesting topic, yes.
But most “economists” from last century just spew things about how capitalism is great, because suggesting otherwise would be a (career) suicide in most of the west during the cold war, and things have been slow to evolve. Also, empirical data is not what defines science. It’s only used to support theories. Otherwise, I can tell you that 99% of the people who take homeopathy for their flue are cured within the week. See how useless “empirical” data can be on their own?
Economists who view themselves as anything more than historians are basically gurus pushing whatever ideology is trending. Even the more mathematical aspects of economics rely on vague theoretical models that cannot be used for anything but filling up a thesis. But if one of those models can predict when ww3 starts, when Putin dies, or who will win the next election in my city, then I’ll admit, maybe they are good for something.
Makes me wonder who, between you and I, needs to learn more about economics.
just because something is BS, doesn’t mean it’s easy. no was I can get a chiropractic license, but that doesn’t mean it isn’t BS.
look at all the nuances and complexities in astrology, it’s still made up thing that brings comfort to some, but it isn’t “easy”.
however the biggest objection to economics, is that it’s a self fulfilling profecy for the rich, they invest in the economical ideas they like, make them popular and into a “science” even with fake Nobel prizes. then those theories get applied because it’s “science” now. only to benefit those who financed those institutions. basically Lobbying with extra steps.
Did you seriously compare a science that uses quantitative and qualitative methodology to astrology?
You’re out of your mind.
BSc stands for Bachelor of Science. Something you would know if you knew what you were talking about.
I have a big, mostly tongue-in-cheek, interest in old spiritualism - Crowley, Rider-Waite, Golden Dawn, alchemy, Eteilla… - i don’t think any of it is “real” but boy howdy can they write screeds on the relationship of quartz to the smell of petrichor, or exactly why going “shh” is a sacred act of the Egyptian diety Hoor-pa-Kraat
Alright. But you’re equating complexity to veracity. That’s just incredibly untrue.
Economics might seem like bollocks if you have a surface-level understanding of it. But the study itself uses the scientific method all the way through.
It doesn’t start from assumptions, and doesn’t treat its hypotheses as tenets.
It’s all just experimental through quantitative/qualitative data, as well as empirical.
no I’m equating complexity of apparatus to individual effort of understanding the complexity.
Understanding a complex system has no bearing on the application of the complex system.
Understanding how the Linux kernel works would be no help in beet farming, that doesn’t mean either endeavor is entirely worthless in context.
using “sciency” terms doesn’t make you a science. look at chiropractors, or Scientology.
What the fuck do you mean.
You don’t even know what economics as a science is, yet you’re comparing it to Scientology, you’re just a troll at this point.
did I say something wrong?
even if there was a crumb of truth in that whole field. it’s far too diluted by bullshit from rich people trying to pass their idiotic ideas on how society should run as fact. they are basically giant lobbying think-tanks.
that’s like trusting climate science sponsored by Shell
That’s not what learning economics is like. Unless you live in a dictatorship I guess.
Economics gives you knowledge and tools, it does not prescribe political or lobby-run ideologies.
It explains them, for the political stances at the very least, such that an economist is equipped with the tools to understand those stances and what an economic agent would choose as part of their decision process following those schools of thought.
But it does not force anything on anyone.
I studied in Europe though, maybe that’s too foreign a thought for you.
Edit: Just so you don’t confuse my description of what is taught for the entirety of what is taught. Political science was only broached upon in the tiniest of ways. It also was part of the game theory courses mostly (where decision making and prediction based on logic and outcomes is the entire point).
Europe is a dictatorship of the owning class, so, according to your logic, Albert is right.
