Megan McArdle: Finding What You're Looking For | Hacker News Reader

Megan McArdle: Finding What You're Looking For

theatlantic.com

14 pointscwan12 comments

She is saying,

Economics is not a hard science. People often try to use it as a hard science to "prove" something in the social realm. Those people are using economics as a pseudo-science.

She has made the case before(in other stories) that Economics is more like psychology than physics. While psychology can give useful information, guide treatment, and affect outcomes, it will never be able to "prove" anything about any person.

Actually, the problem with economics is that it is not enough like psychology. Psychologists generally perform experiments before concocting theories (or at least they conduct them to confirm or invalidate them), whereas economists generally concoct theories and attempt to fit those theories to data that has not been acquired through experimentation.

Economics experiments always seem to tell you exactly how Graduate students in an Ivy-league Econ 503 class would behave in any situation. :P

City Journal makes this argument too: http://www.city-journal.org/printable.php?id=6330 .

Why do people keep putting up Megan Mcardle articles in here? I mean what in the world is noteworthy about this "article"? This is just a rather lazy blog post a little bit of which is a rehash of well known truisms and most of which is a block quote from another blog post.

90% of all blog posts are lazy. 99% of all comments are lazy too.

Yet, I would never put in one of my lazy comments as news item in HN.

That's right. The purpose of news aggregators is to filter them out.

Huh?

So rather than confirm economic theories by using statistical correlations to economic growth or general well-being we should...um...not "hijack economics." Or something.

What's the point of indicting pseudo-science and confirmation bias? Is she saying that economics is a pseudo-science and should not be taken seriously? Or did we decide that the existence of confirmation bias invalidated all scientific inquiry? Should economists give up on back-testing theories and go back to proposing what ought to happen when perfectly rational consumers meet perfectly rational producers?

Remember she's not an economist. She just writes about it, but from all indications she's not an expert, but a good "pop-econ" writer.

I think your post is actually an excellent example of the thing being warned against. If you say "Doing X will maximize growth" that is perfectly scientific, but if you say "Doing X will maximize growth and therefore science says we must do X" is not, because the audience might give some weighting to things besides maximizing growth, changing the outcome. After all "an ought cannot be derived from as is" and people claiming to do so deserve to be criticized.

And if all you've got is a statistical correlation without any good causal reasoning it always pays to remember Goodhart's law.

I think McArdle deserved the nomination Brad deLong gave her: http://delong.typepad.com/sdj/2008/03/stupidest-woman.html

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