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Comment by alphanullmeric | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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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