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Comment by Spooky23 | Hacker News Reader

This is why people don’t trust institutions, and is why we shouldn’t treat economics as science. Smells like willful ignorance to me.

The brain dead obviousness of these shocking new revelations have been apparent to most people for decades — I wrote a paper about it in high school in 1992. I live upstate NY, once an economic powerhouse, now an empty shell. Every sector is dead, from farming to traditional industry.

It was pretty obvious 25 years ago what was happening, and pretty obvious now. Work went to Mexico. That includes the machinery and tooling. Ten years later, it went to China. Automation is a thing, but the jobs left years ago and the upside of automation like mechanical engineering and tools are all being realized in China.

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If it were "brain dead obvious" we wouldn't need to argue about it.

It's not actually obvious whether personal observations are representative of what's going on in other parts of the country that you've never visited. Even if you're well-travelled, you can't see everything. Reporters can't see everything either, and newspapers give us a very biased view of the world.

That's why we rely on statistics, and they're notoriously difficult to get right.

In the end, I'm like: "Studies? You can prove anything with studies." Each study is part of a conversation among economists, and I doubt this will be the last word.

Above comment is saying people don't trust studies and economists.

Studies and economists can be bought.

'X can be bought' can be written about anything. You can be bought. But what does it mean?

We live in a world of uncertainty, but it's not at all true that everything is equally uncertain. An MD is more reliable than a guy in a bar when talking about medicine. An economist is also more reliable, as are certain economists and economic institutions, as are the consensus of economists.

Alchemists were experts on alchemy, but now we know their insights weren't all that useful for what they intended. (Although they were some of the smartest minds in their day.)

Same might be true for many economists. We like to think we've got the right experts, but it turns out we really don't know if the so-called experts have the most useful perspective on matters.

Yeah, you're right.

I think I just particularly mistrust economists.

It's partially that if these new studies are correct it's just amazing how so many economists could be so wrong about something that seems so obvious. I can't even fathom it without imagining they were paid off.

Funny thing is I know people who will bring up talking points of economists in real life while ignoring the "reality on the ground", and I know they aren't paid for. They won't even consider that the economists might be wrong. Maybe there's just been a lot of groupthink in economics.

> how so many economists could be so wrong about something that seems so obvious

My experience is that with very rare exceptions, if I think experts who study an issue are all so obviously wrong, then I'm the one who misunderstands something (about the facts, the experts, or who knows what). The 'everyone's an idiot and missing the obvious' theory rarely holds up.

The study is interesting. Let's not get carried away with the interpretations of a bunch of HN users, of one news report, about one economic study, by a small research institute in Kalamazoo MI.

Experts have been wrong about a lot of things in the past.

In this case I'm not saying "everyone is an idiot and missing the obvious", I'm saying "politicians and economists are idiots and are missing the obvious", because this is a case where the average non-academic person would intuitively believe outsourcing would be bad for American industry in the long run.

I'm not saying that more research shouldn't be done into this, but if it's correct than the incorrect conclusions of economists helped to decimate the American manufacturing industry. If this is the case then how did things go so wrong, and how do we avoid something like this in the future?

It's pretty hard for me to trust economic information that isn't produced by boots-on-the ground data collection. To that point, if the manufacturing sector were booming in the US, how would you explain the countless anecdotes about Americans being laid off and their jobs being outsourced? Where is the analysis that shows these are isolated anecdotes and not stories reflective of a larger trend?

> Where is the analysis that shows these are isolated anecdotes and not stories reflective of a larger trend?

You've just stumbled upon the secret to how corporatists have taken over the west. It seems to me, most any Westerner with a university degree will believe any story they're told, provided the story fits a general narrative, and the person telling the story has a degree or it is printed by one of several accepted "authoritative" sources. Whether it matches what they see when they leave their desk and walk around in the real world seems to make utterly no difference.

The info described in this report is produced based on that kind of data collection (government statistics, etc). The problem is, nobody noticed a mistake in the analysis.

We should distinguish between our suspicions (hey, this looks weird) and investigation. Gut instinct and anecdotal reports are a good source of suspicion, but suspicion without investigation mostly just generates lots of online blather.

So, it's great that some economists were not only suspicious, but did something about it. Too bad it didn't happen sooner!

But maybe there are more mistakes?

Yeah this article just presents a recent narrative from a recent study, it doesn't mean it's right.

Fact is, the social sciences have completely opposite theories with completely opposite causal mechanisms or even opposite ideas about outcomes and conceptualisation. These studies can't even agree on the dependent variable, let alone the independent variable. And they're all championed by top ivy league scholars.

Take the article's theme for example, globalisation and job security. In public administration there's two hypotheses about the way the welfare state responds to job insecurity from globalisation. One is the efficiency hypothesis which expects the welfare state to retrench and become smaller, assuming increased competition forces a sort of race to the bottom effect in order for a state to stay competitive. The other, the compensation hypothesis, expects the welfare state to expand in order to compensate the losers of globalisation (e.g. factory workers in the US). A whole range of studies exist that show evidence for both hypotheses. They keep getting better, moving from correlation to causation, from aggregates to specifics, towards clearer conceptualisation and a semblance of a consensus. But for decades, this is a field where articles were getting published which could easily be written about in newspapers in an incendiary manner like OP's article about how 'we used to get it all wrong', and linking it to some recent populist movement, explaining how it all wasn't so crazy after all.

It's silly. Studies are valuable, but anyone who spent any time in academia, even as a student, should notice studies never translate well to journalism. It's particularly apparent reading about a field he/she is familiar with. The number of times I cared to look into the research underlying news articles and came out thinking 'this article is nonsense' is tiring.

And it's no surprise, I'm guilty of the same behavior of journalists. Either it's ignorance because I'm not a specialist in my field, or I just don't care. I've written a bunch of school assignments taking positions that were blatantly false, ignoring a whole range of literature that didn't agree while making it appear as if I was being nuanced, just to get the essay out of the way. Journalists are likely not much different.

"This is why people don't trust institutions."

Too bad there's no HN gold. :)

While its possible there is something to it, even if there is it irritates me to see so many people harp on Cambridge Analytica and Russia and such for why Trump won. Trump won because he was the only one who really ran on the collapse of the interior as an issue. I am not convinced Russian trolls or CA had much to do with it. At the very least I think without the rust belt he would have lost badly.

There was another, but he was to old and too male to be allowed to run...

It was purely political, he’s barely older than Clinton and gender isn’t the reason they picked someone from the in crowd over an outsider.

But their pick tried to run on gender issues during a prolonged recession...

>Trump won because he was the only one who really ran on the collapse of the interior as an issue.

I feel that while this is why Trump won, Bernie ran on a similar platform. However, Bernie didn't end up becoming the nominee, and we all know what happened next.

The term collapse of the interior is a good one I think to adequately describe the problem. There really is very little meaningful work.

Stats show Trump won more based on culture than economics; Clinton won handily with low income voters.

Low-income voters are disproportionately minorities, who often likely couldn't bring themselves to vote for someone with an overtly racist/nativist platform. For me, the surprising number is how many (especially hispanic voters) actually did vote for Trump. It was an eye-opener when my (black) mother said that she was going to vote for Trump early on in the election cycle, although I'm fairly sure she didn't in the end (I think she chose to leave her presidential pick blank.)

Clinton had the distinct "cultural" advantage IMO, although evangelical voters united fairly monolithically behind Trump; the marketers of culture lined up pretty solidly behind Clinton. It's also important to remember that the culture of white dudism only represents about 1/3 of the country, although it represents a bit higher percentage of voters, and there were a lot of young defectors this cycle.

This statement is not supported by the facts.

https://ropercenter.cornell.edu/polls/us-elections/how-group...

Hillary A) won the popular vote B) won voters who considered economics an important issue C) won voters making less than 50000.

... what do you think your link says?

It's a mistake to look for the single reason someone won an election. There are always many causal factors, all working together, which result in the outcome.

He wasn't the only one, but he was the one that managed to avoid being quashed by the party he was running under. And yes, the numbers bear out that assumption about the rust belt. It was Democratic voters in key states staying home that cost Hillary the result. Many, for instance, were black working class voters that felt hopeful for change under Obama and found that after 8 years, nothing really had changed for them. So they didn't turn out to vote. Hillary and the DNC assumed too much about their support, ironically stereotyping them under a demographic instead of seeing them as people who were still struggling.

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