Hacker News Reader

Comment by arcturus17 | Hacker News Reader

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!

View on HN

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.

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.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com