Comment by jahaja | Hacker News Reader

Comment by jahaja | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

> Bertrand Russell was an amazing logician and mathematician. Albert Einstein was an incredible physicist. I would trust none of them to handle economics.

You guys need to stop pretending that economics is 1. something really really hard that only the most brilliant economists can understand, 2. something fundamentally objective like physics. It was in large part of history even referred to as political economy for crying out loud.

It is true that the study of economics is primarily concerned with the current system and not particularly imaginative with regards to any sort of alternative. Furthermore the incentives are in no way encouraging to challenge the current way of things, if anything the direct opposite. This state of affairs just can't be ignored when evaluating the objective nature of a certain field of study.

> including that it generates decent outcomes in many cases.

For the wealthy. Most of the world is still used as cheap labour for the privilege of the West.

> Re: economics and crashes - I fail to see how the existence of crashes - which is predicted by many economic theories, be they mainstream or not - invalidates anything.

If a majority of the involved "scientists" are surprised that a crash shows up, it strongly suggests that it's largely based on speculation and external motives rather than objective science.

>You guys need to stop pretending that economics is 1. something really really hard that only the most brilliant economists can understand

Economics is about as hard as any other modern applied science. I.e. pretty damn hard, and practitioners are deserving of the same respect accorded to, for instance, social scientists and psychologists, who deal in similarly hard to capture domains.

>It was in large part of history even referred to as political economy for crying out loud.

And it stopped being referred to as "political economy" because of the fundamental upheaval the field of study went through in the early 20th century, which completely reshaped the practice of economics into something completely different from what it was in Adam Smith and Marx's times.

>For the wealthy. Most of the world is still used as cheap labour for the privilege of the West.

I happen to be from one of the countries whose people you would deprive of agency and deride as "cheap labor" and I would argue most of our issues stem from a market where the powerful have way too much opportunity to make sure that regulations that will benefit them and curtail competition are passed, not from the free market. In fact, making our market freer would only have positive effects.

A great contemporary example of how the free market can uplift poorer countries is Rwanda.

>If a majority of the involved "scientists" are surprised that a crash shows up, it strongly suggests that it's largely based on speculation and external motives rather than objective science.

Ecologists are right now scrambling to find explanations for a number of emerging phenomena. Does the fact that we do not have a complete and universally valid model of ecology mean that ecology is "largely based on speculation and external motives rather than objective science"?

> Economics is about as hard as any other modern applied science.

That still doesn't mean that it's indecipherable by brilliant people in other field of studies nor that the core parts are particularly hard.

> because of the fundamental upheaval the field of study went through in the early 20th century

Rather it became hegemonic and unimaginative and only caters to the status quo.

> whose people you would deprive of agency and deride as "cheap labor"

Please, that is the cheapest trick in the book and just dishonest. Posh accent "Oh, so you think the poor can't take care of themselves? How arrogant!".

The fact remains that much of the global norths current abundance is only enabled by the cheap labour and resources of the global south.

> Ecologists are right now scrambling to find explanations for a number of emerging phenomena.

This is just false equivalence and pointless to respond to. There's no vast pools of ecologist who's entire salary depends on some derivative to pan out or similar.

>That still doesn't mean that it's indecipherable by brilliant people in other field of studies nor that the core parts are particularly hard.

Indecipherable? No. But I wouldn't listen to Einstein on economics for the same reason I wouldn't listen to him on geography, even though I'm sure he'd be able to do very well in it if he applied himself. Just look at how many Nobel Prize winners completely fuck up when they try going outside of their specialty.

>Rather it became hegemonic and unimaginative and only caters to the status quo.

Funnily, most economists I know are quite dissatisfied with the status quo. And you know, every economics research department on the face of Earth has a cohort of "heterodox" economists, who deal exactly in challenging the status quo. The issue is that most of the time alternative theories happen to produce worse predictions than the mainstream. Paraphrasing something some famous economist once said - people aren't utility maximizers, but they sure do act like utility maximizers when prices shift!

>"Oh, so you think the poor can't take care of themselves? How arrogant!"

I'm just saying, it does get a bit ridiculous when American socialists start telling me and other people from my country what we're supposed to think and feel.

>There's no vast pools of ecologist who's entire salary depends on some derivative to pan out or similar.

Most academic economists' salary depends on exactly the same thing as ecologists, namely science funding. You might have a point when you talk about economists in think tanks and hedge funds and whatnot, but those guys aren't usually the ones producing most academic material.

> Just look at how many Nobel Prize winners completely fuck up when they try going outside of their specialty.

Either way there's no basis to dismiss people's opinion solely on their primary field of study. One obvious example would be Noam Chomsky. He's deeply knowledgeable outside of his primary field of linguistics.

> very economics research department on the face of Earth has a cohort of "heterodox" economists,

The most common use of heterodox seem to span from status-quo to far-right libertarianism. That's not very imaginative.

> I'm just saying, it does get a bit ridiculous when American socialists start telling me and other people from my country what we're supposed to think and feel.

I'm Swedish, but I assume that wont change anything there. Being from a country doesn't necessarily say anything, you may be from a privileged class of that particular country and thus have that view of that country.

> You might have a point when you talk about economists in think tanks and hedge funds and whatnot, but those guys aren't usually the ones producing most academic material.

There is no other field of study as obviously connected to money and power than the field of economics. This makes it totally reasonable to be skeptical of what comes out of that field.

>The most common use of heterodox seem to span from status-quo to far-right libertarianism. That's not very imaginative.

You might want to look into Marxian economics, Modern Monetary Theory and ecological economics. There's some interesting stuff there that might interest you. :)

I mean, I'm not unaware that there's other strains. But the representation is slim to none.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com