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Comment by coldtea | Hacker News Reader

Because, "It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends upon his not understanding it!".

Economists' careers as receivers of grants, policy advisors, members of prestigious think tanks and organizations, and pundits, depends on being good at promoting whatever aligns with the elite's interests.

The scientific parts of economics are merely applied math (including game theory), and quite basic at that.

The rest are establishment ideology plus/minus some personal improvising to the left or right, and obscurantism, - just like "social science", "political science", "psychology", "architecture" (the conceptual part that gave us the 20th century visual atrocities) and so on.

For real science one needs to stick to physics, chemistry, engineering, and other "hard" stuff.

Heck, even Computer Science itself (whose actual scientific part is basically math as well), is taught, and practiced like fashion, based on commercial trends du jour...

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Not sure if your point holds if you read more of the article, which implies that plenty of economists are critical of wage and wealth disparities just for different reasons. My personal read is that Piketty doesn't bother to come up with a "microfounded" rational for his theory and since this is the bread and butter of macro, his r > g theory hasn't been taken seriously. I will say that the basic empirical work of measuring the increase in inequality over the last fifty years seems to be taken very seriously. At least in my limited view of the discipline.

To an extent, I suspect you're right.

I further suspect that economists, as a field, will continue to claim that their models, metrics, theories, and policy advice are good, while complaining about the inexplicable rise of populism, right up until somebody sets up a guillotine in front of Goldman-Sachs. (Populism is easy to explain: the peasants are revolting.)

Populism is a major problem, and one which is based on unscrupulous politicians taking advantage of the ignorance and prejudice while promissing unrealisting and outright impossible solutions to problems that they missrepresent and even invent.

And that has absolutely zero to do with science in general and economic models in particular.

Time and again we see populist politicians fanning up the masses with anti-capitalist rhetoric that is absolute bullshit from the start, and they routinely attack economic problems by disregarding basic facts of nature with assertions involving silly conspiracy theories always attributing blame to their political opponents and scapegoats. Every time this happens it does not mean that science failed or that there is a massive conspiracy theory keeping the socialist man down. It just means that disregarding science has serious consequences that no totalitarian regime can quelsh no matter how many gillotines they set up in feont of Goldman-Sachs.

>Populism is a major problem, and one which is based on unscrupulous politicians taking advantage of the ignorance and prejudice while promissing unrealisting and outright impossible solutions to problems that they missrepresent and even invent.

Isn't that also what the elites (say, the 10%-ers) have historically also said for realistic and entirely possible solutions (like beheading the King and building a democratic state, or stopping segregation, or extending the vote to women, or adding labor protections, or welfare, and so on), that they felt were beneath them, because they were demanded by the populace and went against their interests as a class?

Every modern right has been established by struggles, parties, mass revolts, and so on, deemed "populist", "vulgar", "irresponsible", and "destructive" at the time by those opposing them.

Every single one of them.

Exactly. Margaret Thatcher epitomized this with her famous catchphrase:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/There_is_no_alternative

The politburo in the Soviet Union probably employed a similar style of propaganda.

Pretty big difference between deemed populist by the king and deemed populist by the middle class, by secular opposition to that populism, and so on.

That said, you are right, the struggle is real. But it's likely not the 10%, but probably less or a lot more, depending on how you view people who benefit from the status quo. For example anyone who buys a new car, plans a trip, ponders over a job offer, submits an offer on a tender has options to try to rock the boat. Greener, more fair, more just options are usually there - but of course those usually also require some kind of trade off. Do we want something that's good on the long term, or something that's good on the short term?

And based on how many options people have and how little they value the long term, the global perspective we could classify them into different kinds of beneficiaries of the status quo. And it's enough for a small cabal of cooperating power brokers to benefit themselves to and unimaginably huge degree. As in significant portion of the world's "income" goes to people who had the option to enrich themselves and took it.

Sure, this can be complicated further by looking at those who enriched themselves then proceeded to spend those riches on goals that ultimately help others - but these deviations are usually small, and again, ultimately, can be factored in.

However, sometimes beheading kings is contraproductive as you get a civil war. Similarly just adding more voters does not magically lead to a fairer outcome. The classic example is adding more and more cannibals will eventually lead to a bit of a pickle.

>like beheading the King and building a democratic state

Beheading the king has never lead to a democratic state.

The end of segregation as well as suffrage were achieved by slow evolutionary process.

Revolutions and radical means had never achieved anything but chaos, mass slaughter and poverty.

It relates to economic models insofar as said models are used to justify the persistence of certain inequalities in society. The existence of these inequalities can then be exploited by populists in their rhetoric.

> It relates to economic models insofar as said models are used to justify the persistence of certain inequalities in society.

Not quite. Models only explain relationships between parameters.

Moreover, inequality is a meaningless concept that is the posterchild of how the goalpost is kept moving by populist politicians. It's meaningless in its definition, as it is kept very maleable to fit the argument, and it's meaningless in the conclusion, as there is no problem in having someome earning more than his neighbor.

Thing is populists tactics wouldn't get as much traction if the prejudice was not as bad, or worsening in the first place. Populism starts as a natural consequence of misery and lack of education, then becomes a cause that keeps reinforcing itself until the guillotine moment.

Solving the populism issue means tackling the root issues it feeds from first.

> Thing is populists tactics wouldn't get as much traction if the prejudice was not as bad, or worsening in the first place.

The problem is that prejudice is also invented and disseminated by these unscrupulous politicians with their populist rhetoric. We see that in any extreme cormer of the political spectrum, whether its anti-capitalist socialists or racial supremacists. History is packed with examples where totalitarian regimes outright negate science to push their absurd populist rhetoric.

Which of the anti-capitalist socialist, racial supremacists, or totalitarians are responsible for the recent drops in life expectancy in the US, out of curiosity?

https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/us-life-expectancy...

This is all true. I would also add to this as a cause the trend of media outlets publishing a larger proportion of populist and outrage -driven content than they used to, which I suspect is a reaction to the new attention-driven business models that news outlets rely on these days.

It is neither ignorant nor prejudiced to notice that your standard of living, and that of your children, have been rather stagnant in recent memory.

The ignorant part is blaming Mexicans, Chinese or cyclists when reality is much more complicated than that. Building a wall won't improve healthcare, and insulting diplomatic partners won't return manufacturing jobs.

A reality being "more complicated" doesn't mean it doesn't have simple constituent parts (kinda like FFT).

Our reality is still created by a contribution of several factors, some of which have greater weight, it's not some intangible mass of confusion with no alternative but "business as usual" as the "non-populists" present it.

It might not have been Chinese themselves, for example, but it was the outsourcing and migration of industries that left many people without a job (and no real prospect for "re-education" and a new career, at most a crappy lower deal).

We’ve actually had a taste of a world without Goldman Sachs and its ilk performing their functions: the credit freeze right after the crash. Was that better?

Oh, hell no! :-)

On the other hand, there's a difference between the ilk performing their functions and the tail wagging the dog.

(I specifically picked on GS because this weird sense I have that US economic policy has been outsourced to Goldman-Sachs for several decades.)

That's like: "We had a taste of a world after segregation, the LA riots. Was that better?".

The "credit freeze right after the crash" still happened within the crash that Goldman Sachs and its ilk caused, and still happened in a world where Goldman Sachs and its ilk set the rules.

The LA riots are what happens when we continue to have excessive and racist policing past the end of public acceptance of it. No excessive and racist use of force, no LA riots.

The financial crisis is what happens when we don't have access to credit. Whether the financial industry self-destructs as in 2008 or is destructed by the guillotines outside, you're going to have a hard time getting credit without it. No credit, we'd just be in the 2009 world at steady state.

Economics as used in policy seems to be mostly about using outrageously nonsensical arguments to justify tax cuts and increase corporate power by cutting regulations that enforce corporate responsibility.

The results are predictably grim for everyone who isn't a 0.1%er - sometimes fatally so.

There's a side-field of purely academic economics which includes heterodox ideas like MMT, but they - currently - have almost zero chance of having an influence on government policy.

I'm always bemused that psychics are regularly attacked by sceptics for being dangerous and fraudulent scammers who act in bad faith.

On the evidence, policy economists are vastly more dangerous.

A bad faith psychic might bankrupt a handful of people. Bad faith economists can bankrupt entire countries and/or force entire generations into debt - but sceptics seem to swallow what they have to sell with no rational oversight, and sometimes with support and approval.

And that is exactly what so called climate sceptics say about climate science or what antivaxxers say about conventional medicine.

You can take a look at track records of predictions and policy interventions to compare those fields. Vaccine did in fact significantly reduce or even eradicate some diseases. The track record of predictions out of economics is a lot spottier.

Can biologists or paleontologists forecast evolution? Can meteorologists forecast the weather in four months?

> Vaccine did in fact significantly reduce or even eradicate some diseases. The track record of predictions out of economics is a lot spottier.

The same applies to the track record of seismologists. Moreover, forecasting is a very, very small field of economics.

The original criticism is that Piketty is a strongly normative economist whose views bounce off most of the field. Your criticism is that economics is too normative and should be less so and focused on math instead.

It is hard to square your criticism in a way that leads to people paying more attention to Piketty.

Telling scientists to stick to physics and chemistry for "real science" seems like telling rock climbers to stick to ladders for "real climbing."

It's possible to produce useful predictions with small errors when you define very simple systems, which is what the foundational scientific topics have done. Of course it took centuries of hard work to do even that.

Physicists and chemists and biologists and economists all study the same thing. It's just that most chemists use heuristics to avoid dealing with the full physical complexity, and most biologists use heuristics to avoid dealing with the full chemical complexity.

Unfortunately, the jump in complexity from biology to the behavior of a population of humans is still too complex; we don't have great heuristics for that yet.

It seems kind of short-sighted to me to say that the people who are trying to build those aren't doing "real science." I don't understand the theory there... that they haven't figured it all out yet, so it's not worth doing?

> It seems kind of short-sighted to me to say that the people who are trying to build those aren't doing "real science." I don't understand the theory there... that they haven't figured it all out yet, so it's not worth doing?

It's not about heuristics. It's about experimental validation. Both physicists and chemists take great pain in actually rigorously confronting their theories to reality. Biologists try. Most economists don't.

It doesn't mean there is no value in economic models and theories. It does however mean it's not a science.

> Both physicists and chemists take great pain in actually rigorously confronting their theories to reality.

I guess string theorists haven't gotten the memo yet?

Exactly. Capital was years in the making and contained an unprecedented amount of historical empirical data to support its central thesis, and it gets ignored. Meanwhile, Reinhart-Rogoff, a fraudulent paper full of elementary statistical and programming errors that should’ve gotten its authors fired, was loudly paraded around as gospel by politicians on both sides of the Atlantic. Guess which one served elite interests the best.

The Reinhart and Rogoff Controversy: A Summing Up (https://www.newyorker.com/news/john-cassidy/the-reinhart-and...)

It's outright stupid to pin the blame on what you perceive to be a problem on a single academic paper, even if it was authored by outstanding academics such as Reinhart or Rogoff. It's even stupider to argue that scientists should be fired for publishing a paper that goes against your political values.

> even if it was authored by outstanding academics such as Reinhart or Rogoff

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Argument_from_authority

> argue that scientists should be fired for publishing a paper that goes against your political values

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Straw_man

It is not an argument from authority. It's a statement of fact that both authors have published a very long body of work including very high-value contributions to science, and they are not suddenly incompetent idiots just because they've published a paper that a random guy on the interned perceives as being politically inconvenient.

And the OP quite literally argued the scientists who authored the paper should be forced out of their job just because they published an academic paper that he found to be politically inconvenient, which is sheer lunacy.

They are not idiots, just highly motivated political operators using papers full of mistakes to make a point. That's the part that should have gotten them fired but since you agree with their goals then you don't take issue with that.

> They are not idiots, just highly motivated political operators using papers full of mistakes to make a point.

That's a repeat of the old tired strawman that tries to avoid discussing the facts and the data by depicting any academic who authors an inconvenient paper as being a political agent involved in some widespread anti-socialist conspiracy.

Meanwhile, let's not forget that the people attacking the Roggof&Reinhart paper are somehow criticizing the fact that highly indebted states experience lower growth rates, as if either increasing sovereign debt or siphoning cash from the budget to service debt has no impact on the nation's finances.

Oh my, where do I start. Alright, let's go in order.

re:Strawman - So you're trying to tell me that the Chicago School of Economics doesn't have a right leaning bent and inspires itself in the work of the Austrian economics. Yeah, you could say that but it's bullshit.

re: high indebtness. people criticizing RR are doing it because the paper is bad. Plus, as Paul Krugman correctly notes, high level of debt could be a result of economic slowdown and not the cause (best example is Japan).

see more: https://www.nytimes.com/2013/04/19/opinion/krugman-the-excel...

Sorry that reality doesn't agree with your views.

(Setting aside the argument from authority, which you continue,)

Here is the actual argument:

> full of elementary statistical and programming errors that should’ve gotten its authors fired

Here is your characterization:

> the OP quite literally argued the scientists who authored the paper should be forced out of their job just because they published an academic paper that he found to be politically inconvenient

> Because, "It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends upon his not understanding it!".

Alternative hypothesis: they disagree.

Disagreeing isn't ignoring. It isn't a conspiracy. It's just disagreement.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Na%C3%AFve_realism_(psychology...

"But perhaps the greatest rebuke of Piketty to be found among academic economics is not contained in any of these overt or veiled attacks on his scholarship and interpretation, but rather in the deafening silence that greets it, as well as inequality in general, in broad swathes of the field—even to this day. You can search through the websites of several leading economics departments or the official lists of working papers curated by federal agencies and not come across a single publication that has any obvious or even secondary bearing on the themes raised by Capital in the Twenty-First Century, even in order to oppose them. It is as though the central facts, controversies, and policy proposals that have consumed our public debate about the economy for three years are of little-to-no importance to the people who are paid and tenured to conduct a lifetime’s research into how the economy works."

This is still not evidence of conspiracy (but has the structure of classic conspiracy theories). It just means the mainstream looked at it and disagreed.

Nobody is owed attention from any discipline of study. Absence of attention is not conclusive evidence of anything.

Nobody is owed anything, but since publications are the currency of research and the measure by which academics are evaluated, publishing a critique of something as widely and publicly discussed as Piketty's books should be very tempting for academic economists (assuming that economics is a normal academic discipline).

So in front of that background, the silence is suspicious, and the most plausible explanation is that the majority of participants would like to disagree but find themselves unable to put forward such a critique.

>Disagreeing isn't ignoring. It isn't a conspiracy. It's just disagreement.

I've read a lot of those "disagreements". Most of them are thinly veil-led attacks and facile dismissals, the kind that pass for criticism in mass media today.

This is not a meaningful sample. The mass media is not "Economists", as an academic discipline.

FYI: Looks like the back part of your comment got cut off.

Thanks, fixed it. Posted it prematurely to not lose my train of thought, but caught a part midway.

This comment manages to mix some elitist contempt of the arts with a whiff of conspiracy theory, while not saying anything of substance about Piketty’s work. Well done!

Thanks. You've managed to be personally insulting without adding anything of substance, to my comment, Piketty's work, or to the general question of why economists would shun it.

I've particularly enjoyed the "elitist contempt of the arts" part (whatever that means, since "contempt of the arts" is usually base, not elitist, not to mention the fact that I don't mention "the arts" at all), and the thought-stopper accusation of "conspiracy" (who dare think that scholars would ever align themselves to convenient output to benefit their careers and pockets, in this best of all possible worlds! As Gore Vidal once put it "Americans have been trained by media to go into Pavlovian giggles at the mention of 'conspiracy' because for an American to believe in a conspiracy he must also believe in flying saucers or, craziest of all, that more than one person was involved in the JFK murder"). Well done.

I think you'd agree with me that the problems with post WWII "social science", "political science", "psychology", "architecture" are precisely that they're trying to ape the physical sciences and not just be art.

And this is utterly true of Economics more than anything. And actually while a lot of arts have been pulling themselves back from that rat hole economics just keeps digging deeper.

As Ha Joon Chang points out in his book Economics: The User's Guide, economics is about political arguments yet pretends as if it's a science. Hence most economists don't like the politics of Pinkety's economics. Which is what the op was alluding to though he did not mention explicitly... because they depend on money from people who don't like forwarding that political agenda. Secondly, it seems that the math that he used to make some of those arguments is not up to par so that makes it easy to dismiss his political arguments, and that's the issue when you go up against the status quo you better have inscrutable math because they are going to find any reason to dismiss you.

Just because something isn't science, doesn't mean that it is art. Social "sciences", psychology and the like are neither. It is true however that they get more and more ridiculous when they try to dress their ideologies in a scientifically-sounding language to get a piece of the cake which is credibility that the hard sciences cooked for themselves, at the same time having remarkably little to do with any science at all.

Who are you to decide what is science and what isn't? What is your model of what a science is anyway? As long as you can't answer that, the only thing unscientific is your comment.

I understand science the way Popper wrote about it. Yes, my comment is unscientific. I've never claimed otherwise. Just because something is unscientific, doesn't mean it doesn't have value. E.g. I study mathematics and I do not consider mathematics a science (I know many other mathematicians who share this attitude) and yet I consider the study of mathematics to be one the best ways to spend my time.

It sounds like you’ve discovered the problems with the softer sciences. You should look into whatever you consider a “real” science and see if it doesn’t have many of the same problems. That would require a bit more effort and intellect, problems in psychology and economics are pretty obvious, but you might be amazed by what you find.

I agree that there are fundamental problems in the hard sciences as well. E.g. the hype around string theory in physics. However, in this case I am told by the physicists, whom I know personally, that no physicist considers it "real physics" - they consider it mathematics (and many mathematicians consider it poor mathematics). The issue here seems largely to be the distorted image that the press presents of the views of the scientific community.

There are other examples, but the problems are nowhere near as big as in the fields my comment was suspicious of. And of course there surely are a lot of problems I don't have the slightest idea about. Still, the mindset of the scientists I know is so much different from the mindset of sociologists and others who seem much more driven by fashion. Back to physicists, I don't claim they are exempt from the influence of fashion. I claim that the impact of this influence is on a whole different level; there are lines that are not crossed, everything is up for falsification by experiment, and if it isn't falsifiable, then to hell with it etc. All of this makes me trust them a lot more.

The problem with economics is the money riding on it. If one day the consensus becomes "raising the minimum wage by $5 only impacts profit; it doesn't impact employment" then a lot of very rich people stand to lose a lot of money as it becomes more politically palatable.

Economics is the most highly paid soft science for a reason.

Climate science has the same issue but fortunately they have managed to resist the corrupting influence of money.

Their hard science fetish isn't really the issue. Money is.

Yeah 1960-80's post modern literary criticism is just embarrassing and no cares. Modern architecture is merely ugly. But economics enabled real harm to people and communities.

> The problem with economics is the money riding on it. If one day the consensus becomes "raising the minimum wage by $5 only impacts profit; it doesn't impact employment" then a lot of very rich people stand to lose a lot of money as it becomes more politically palatable.

Reality is a bit more nuanced than you depict it [1][2].

> Climate science has the same issue but fortunately they have managed to resist the corrupting influence of money.

So scientists are more or less corrupt, depending on how much you think they agree with you?

[1]http://www.igmchicago.org/surveys/minimum-wage

[2]http://www.igmchicago.org/surveys/15-minimum-wage

There is a good good comment by Martin Gardner about fallacious science. Which is when the evidence and scientific feedback are weak[1] then scientific theories strongly mimic the cultural biases of the people involves.

That's modern economic orthodoxy in a nutshell.

It's not just economics that's an issue a friend used to date a lady that was getting (25 years ago) a double major in anthropology and artificial intelligence. She said from an anthropological perspective AI research was nothing but white academic introspection.

[1] Example of strong feedback, two 737-MAX's crashing within a few months.

"(T)he problems with post WWII "social science", "political science", "psychology", "architecture" are precisely that they're trying to ape the physical sciences and not just be art."

I'm not well versed in areas other than architecture, but I'm really puzzled where you'd go with this thesis with respect to that discipline. Would you care to elaborate further? I'm genuinely curious.

It is easy to point out the flaws in others. It is harder to recognize that we are hypocrites who have the very same flaws we accuse others as having. Perhaps the world would be a better place if we all stopped to first check to see if there beams in our eyes that would need casting before targeting the motes in others' eyes.

Or perhaps sometimes other people are actually wrong.

Arts? Economics is more of a religion than a science.

If you poke at economists you get the exact same arrogant rage that you get when you poke at fundamentalist religions.

Go ahead poke at Milton Friedman and watch them get really hot under the collar.

Compare with poking at Einstein (never accepted quantum mechanics) or Linus Pauling (alternative medicine nutter), Shockley (racist). Poke all you want the physics community doesn't care.

The physics and math communities get plenty agitated at ludicrous pop-sci and Hollywood depictions, cranks who think they are oppressed geniuses with important answers, etc. Approach just about anyone with arrogance and contempt for the methods and body of knowledge they spend their life on, and they won’t be happy about it.

Difference between annoyed/amused/slight despondency and narcissistic rage.

It's kinda of like this, a mechanical engineer doesn't feel threatened by some guy selling a magnetic doohickey you put in series with your cars fuel line to increase MPG. He just thinks it's stupid. He's not mad though.

Economists get angry.

And some physicians get mad at homeopaths. So what?

> Go ahead poke at Milton Friedman and watch them get really hot under the collar.

Who is them? Do you think economics hasn't made any progress sice the 1970s and everyone is a paleomonetarist?

Oh I think progress has been made, retrograde progress. Economists as less competent now than they were back then.

It is exceptionally difficult to prove economic theories because experiments cannot be repeated. The variables are always changing, and there is far from complete control over them.

Microeconomists and behavioural economists do indeed conduct repeatable experiments. This is more difficult for macroeconomists, of course, but the same is true for many sciences, such as theoretical physics, climate science or much of biology.

Yay. Another bash on the actually hard sciences such as neuroscience and biology, you know, the sciences that have to contend with complexity.

Who said anything about them? Or complexity?

you mention psychology, then go on the mention the hard sciences.

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