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Comment by mempko | Hacker News Reader

Cowen is an economist while Graeber was a scientist. Graeber's book based off his article was well researched and has a lot of empirical data. While Cowen just makes stuff up in his criticism.

So who do we listen to? Economists (a very dubious and arguably the most bullshit profession?) or an anthropologist who creates well researched and thoughtful works?

Cowen completely missed Graeber's point in his criticism.

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Economics: arguably the most bullshit profession

Anthropology: True Science

> Graeber was a scientist

Graeber starts with a conclusion, and cherry picks evidence that supports his conclusion. This is the opposite of science.

> Economists (a very dubious and arguably the most bullshit profession?)

Yet somehow, countries that do a better job at following the recommendations of economists before more prosperous that don't.

>> Cowen is an economist while Graeber was a scientist

Graeber:

"Apple Computers is a famous example: it was founded by (mostly Republican) computer engineers who broke from IBM in Silicon Valley in the 1980s, forming little democratic circles of twenty to forty people with their laptops in each other’s garages"

That's a scientist?

If that's a scientist then I am done trusting scientists.

It's seems this was a garbled sentence in the first edition. Here was Graebers response:

> There was a garbled sentence in the first edition that I didn't catch in proofreading but was instantly removed as soon as anyone noticed it. DeLong has seized on this and endlessly reproduced it, quite possible hundreds of times, pretending it's still in the text.

> Why does he do this sort of thing? I honestly have no idea. I've never seen anyone else behave remotely like it.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17250282

Thank you! I was looking for this.

Graeber was an anthropologist which is not science, or at least not any more than economics.

> Graeber was a scientist.

I literally laughed out loud.

You laugh but Alex Stepanov, the creator of the STL wouldn't. He talked about the real science is about meticulous categorization. And this is what anthropology does. Even the hard sciences are about meticulous categorization, like the standard model in physics. Anthropology also has theories and predictions.

Anthropology is not science and economics is far more quantitative than any humanities ever will be. And more importantly, economists usually have the honesty to call their opinion an opinion and separate it from the statistics, whereas any metric used by a humanities person usually comes in the form of a number they attached to their opinion to present as a fact.

Economics is rather dodgy as a science as well, at least compared to the physical sciences. e.g. (as has been said of philosophers) is there anything more predictable than two economists who will give the opposite recommendations on nearly any question of consequence? That is not science, that is politics. Or at least the science is still in its infancy on questions like that.

This is a pretty common misconception. Nearly all economics agree that free markets are good, immigration is a net benefit, rent controls are bad, congestion pricing is good, lowering corporate tax rates are good, the gold standard is a bad idea. Politicians disagree on all or most of these things, but nearly all economists are in consensus about this stuff.

Well yeah. If you're trying to make a career as an economist, you have to uphold the status quo. Pepsi or the Wall Street Journal aren't interested in what a Marxist economist thinks of the economy.

There are other forms of economic thought, but, IMO, they all start from different fundamentals. If the goal is profit and productivity, there's various ways to organize an economy to pursue that goal. If the goal is human flourishing, then alternative economic models are needed.

this is a point that massively gets overlooked in economic academic circles. especially since the fall of the berlin wall and dismantling of the USSR/eastern block.

neoliberal economics tends to disregards any other basics of economics as an afterthought, and the philosophical debate about how a country's goals (and thus economy) should be build hasn't been held since.

It is neoclassical economics. (E.g. the ones with the equilibrium models)

Neoliberalism is a political philosophy from the 70s akin to Thatcher or Reagan. A lot of neoclassical economics is intended to make neoliberalism look good but that doesn't mean they are the same thing.

You do realize that economics relies entirely on humanities, right? Psychology, sociology, philosophy, etc without such fields economics cannot reach any of the conclusions they have suggested since the field's creation.

But it is hysterical to see people try to separate economics from humanities.

As I stated in my original comment, the econometrics component of economics is rigorous and objective. The conclusions drawn by economists is not. I have equally little respect for the humanities component of economics. Like with anthropologists, economists are unfortunately also capable of survey statistics and attaching numbers to opinions to pretend they are facts:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Economist_Democracy_Inde...

Scientific America has a good piece about this.

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/why-anthropology-...

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