Hacker News Reader

Comment by MiguelX413 | Hacker News Reader

Economics is the worst social science, an economist is never considered wrong, only of a different “school of economics”. Economists speak as if they have authority and as if their field is objective, but at the same time have those “schools”. Is there such a thing as an unideological economist?

View on HN

I think your idea of economics is more informed by online debate than actual research. Contemporary economists mostly try to articulate things through econometrics, which is a fairly data driven field. It’s fair if you have issues with the rigor of these studies but a discussion of schools is fairly off base from my experience.

Correct. A graduate degree in economics is much closer to an applied math degree than something that resembles what we would traditionally consider social sciences.

To me it seemed like there were two kinds of economics degrees.

One was a math degree pretending to be about the economy. At the graduate level, it could be a science: actually going out and measuring things with some pretty hardcore tools, and then publishing a theory that nobody who ought to use it (AKA politicians) would ever be able to understand. There's real findings here on stuff like the minimum wage, which you'd think someone would care about.

It could also be just some extremely complicated derivations that pretended they were related to the real world, but with ridiculously mathematical assumptions.

The other was a softie-softie "talk about how the world works" degree with barely any mathematics, just lots of readings and essays.

You could choose what you wanted to do.

This is why I've never quite figured out how to assess economics graduates. I don't know what they got up to. They also seem to do some very disparate kinds of work once they (I guess I should say "we") graduate.

> You could choose what you wanted to do.

Interesting. Did students choose by selecting different institutions with different ideas of what should go into that degree, or is there very wide flexibility in course requirements?

Different courses at the same institution

My objection is to the idea that everything true and important can be captured in metrics and quantitatively modeled. Then there is the fact that even to the extent that things like macroeconomics can be modeled (which is never at a level of accuracy that would be accepted in any scientific discipline), it still often fails to capture the social/political dynamics of the moment such that the theory matches felt experience. I believe that economics has largely captured power in social science by essentially stealing scientific authority and falsely claiming it as their own. Then they dismiss other fields of social inquiry as soft and unworthy of equal status even though their own insights are often of lesser value than the supposedly soft social sciences.

I'm an acolyte in the church of bounded rationality and the fallibility of institutions that practice science.

I studied journalism as an undergraduate, and my beliefs here are like in journalism. Objectivity is impossible, like a Platonic ideal. But, it's an excellent thing to strive for. "Fuck it, it's impossible" is the wrong answer in my opinion.

Qualitative methods and pure theory scholarship have their place, but most useful qualitative research at least hints at some testable hypotheses. I feel that an underemphasis on generalizability is what happens when disciplines give up. And at worse, theory-based scholarship as it's applied in some social sciences is really no better than really obtusely worded political punditry.

Exact numbers are easy to measure but not the only way to measure something. Data-driven is the new statistics but 10x worse because it has more sources of obfuscation, and bean counters (including super “smart” and analytically minded) obsess narrowly over models. Add ML/AI and you got an order of magnitude again.

There’s an impedance mismatch where we have enormous amounts of useless data and a small amount of useful data. Best we can do is use and create more of the useful data instead of obsessing over P>.99 on something useless that will be misinterpreted anyway.

The problem, in my view, isn’t qualitative per se, but rather unfalsifiability. Ideology is when the solution is always more of the same no matter what the outcome is. Communism/socialism and neoliberalism all fall in this category. I believe this holds true if you go more academic into Keynesianism and say Chicago school - models that have become truisms to their followers.

I studied journalism as an undergraduate

Objectivity is impossible

These two statements are at opposition with one another.

I was a journalist for 20 years, and any entry-level reporter can put together a completely objective story. It happens thousands of times a day. Unless you somehow derive bias in stories like "A woman died when her car hit a brick wall on Main Street."

Saying objectivity is not possible is just an internet-age excuse for mental laziness.

>"A woman died when her car hit a brick wall on Main Street."

Except no reporter would write this single sentence as a story.

Please present an example story which is both realistic (could be published or broadcast as is) and also completely objective.

How is objectivity possible? Your writing and the reader’s interpretation of it are entirely dependent on individual sensory input and mental models, which are influenced by cultural differences in upbringing and other environmental sociological factors.

The writing inevitably leans towards “objectivity” in your worldview.

Facts that are included in a story or left out at the journalist's discretion have the power to create very different impressions on people.

For example, in your story, if Main Street is known to house many brothels or abortion clinics, merely mentioning it in the story may have the effect of hardening public opinion towards the victim. If the story were to mention the make and model of the car, and there had been many crashes with that model recently, it might stir up suspicion about that car manufacturer. Almost any detail can be charged in this way.

All good journalists strive to be as objective as possible, part of which means being aware of these kinds of charges, and balancing them against delivering detailed information.

My idea of economics is based on people who are interviewed with “economist” written under their name when they're introduced on screen. Whether it be online or by mainstream news outlets, an economist that agreed with what the creator wants to convey is always easily found.

But that's not the actual science, that's an economist giving opinions on a news show. You can find plenty of examples of physicists giving opinions on lots of things also. Go look on Sabine Hossenfelder's YT channel.

Data driven analytics is more or less useless if you're ideologically driven.

At the end of the day all of our economists are raging capitalists, so they will always approach any data gathered from a capitalist perspective. They will purposefully ignore any other possibilities because they are literally incapable of thinking about them. It's not something they've ever considered or digested.

It's a lot like being car-brained. It's why very smart people keep proposing trains with extra steps but never calling them trains - they can't. Their minds lack the ability to view transportation outside of a car-centric perspective.

Similarly, these economists lack the part of their brain where they can examine economics in a non-capitalist perspective. This is despite the fact that there are zero capitalist countries on Earth. In the US alone, 40% of our GDP comes from government spending. Shh, don't tell the economists!

I see this claim about how people have “a wrong idea of what economics truly is” all the time when someone criticizes economics, but it's a No True Scotsman fallacy. Economics really is like that, and no it's not being “data driven” it's publication-driven with tons of p-hacking in order to either:

1. fit the author's worldview (these people tend to become the famous ones),

2. or simply get one more paper published to survive the publish-or-perish rat race (the average Joe).

Paul Romer of the New York Stern School of Business has talked about the crisis of identifiability[1] which makes most macroeconomics non-falsifiable and completely isolates economists from ever being wrong in their theories. He's likened this to the crisis with string theory in physics.

[1] https://paulromer.net/the-trouble-with-macro/WP-Trouble.pdf

One of the stronger criticisms of Economics as a discipline is that double-blind reviewing of papers is uncommon, and there has been a trend in the past 25 years for the subset of Econ journals that did use double-blind reviewing to move away from it.

Not being an economist, I was surprised to learn this. There are reasons for it, e.g., the prevalence of working papers in the field, but it promotes insularity of ideas and creates an uneven playing field for less well-known and connected researchers.

It's certainly worthy of study. The whole ecosystem of a "science" might be bad at one point in time, and all the practitioners might be wrong, but one day in the future the field could "get it right"!

The funny thing is that all who enter the realm of politics magically become instant expert "economists".

The UK's Rachel Reeves was suddenly falling over herself to associate any scrap of experience she's had with "economics" [0].

All the actual scientists and hard business decision makers I know try to distance themselves from such jibber-jabber.

[0] https://order-order.com/2024/10/24/rachel-reeves-bank-econom...

"she studied philosophy, politics and economics at the University of Oxford, where she was an undergraduate student at New College, achieving a 2:1 Bachelor of Arts degree in June 2000.[8] From 2003 to 2004 she studied for a master's degree in economics at the London School of Economics."

It makes no sense if you treat it as a science. It makes perfect sense if you treat it as a pr department for whichever government or group is funding it. Whether you are a 1890s industrialist or a 1920s Marxist there is an economist for you.

> Economics is the worst social science, an economist is never considered wrong, only of a different “school of economics”. Economists speak as if they have authority and as if their field is objective, but at the same time have those “schools”. Is there such a thing as an unideological economist?

Economics is falsifiable.

For example, a bunch of folks made a prediction ("currency debasement and inflation") when the US Federal reserve started QE:

> We believe the Federal Reserve’s large-scale asset purchase plan (so-called “quantitative easing”) should be reconsidered and discontinued. We do not believe such a plan is necessary or advisable under current circumstances. The planned asset purchases risk currency debasement and inflation, and we do not think they will achieve the Fed’s objective of promoting employment.

* https://www.hoover.org/research/open-letter-ben-bernanke

A bunch of other folks (e.g., Keynesians like Krugman) made a bunch of prediction as well. One group turned out right, another did not. Another experiment where one group predicted tax cuts would spur growth:

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kansas_experiment

Others predicted it would not, and were right. There was also sorts of folks talking that cutting government spending would spur growth, i.e., "expansionary austerity":

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Expansionary_fiscal_contractio...

Others predicted it would not, and turned out correct:

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Austerity:_The_History_of_a_Da...

Amsterdam ended up running a bit of an 'experiment' on what happens when you tried banning houses owned by investors:

* https://frw.studenttheses.ub.rug.nl/3913/1/Master%20Thesis%2...

* https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=4480261

* Via: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BRqZBuu_Ers

There are "schools" that put forward various models that get it right more than wrong. The fact that some people ignore things for ideological purposes is not the fault of the field in general, or of those that actually try to get their models to match reality.

In fact a lot of the time people know that what they're putting forward is wrong:

> Ronald Reagan launched his 1980 campaign for the presidency on a platform advocating for supply-side economics. During the 1980 Republican Party presidential primaries, George H. W. Bush had derided Reagan's economic approach as "voodoo economics".[23][24] Following Reagan's election, the "trickle-down" reached wide circulation with the publication of "The Education of David Stockman" a December 1981 interview of Reagan's incoming Office of Management and Budget director David Stockman, in the magazine Atlantic Monthly. In the interview, Stockman expressed doubts about supply side economics, telling journalist William Greider that the Kemp–Roth Tax Cut was a way to rebrand a tax cut for the top income bracket to make it easier to pass into law.[25] Stockman said that "It's kind of hard to sell 'trickle down,' so the supply-side formula was the only way to get a tax policy that was really 'trickle down.' Supply-side is 'trickle-down' theory."[25][26][27]

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trickle-down_economics#Reagan_...

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Supply-side_economics

> Economics is falsifiable.

I'm sorry but you can't say that about a field that gave a “Nobel” prize to Fama, shared with Shiller for his work which falsified Fama's.

And your following “effect of QE” example is actually a great example of the problem: pretty much none of the people who made wrong prediction retracted themselves, most of them still believe they were right but the reality just happened to turn otherwise.

> I'm sorry but you can't say that about a field that gave a “Nobel” prize to Fama, shared with Shiller for his work which falsified Fama's.

Or it shows things are complicated.

I once read the remark from a physicist (Feynman?): My job would be much harder if particles had free will.

Which is exactly what economics is trying to model: there are aggregate trends that tend to be followed (on average) by larger number of people, but there are plenty of folks off in the tails of the curve doing strange things (sometimes out of spite: see Gamestop and /r/wallstreetbets).

I participate in personal finance sub-Reddits, and during March 2020 when the world was going sideways, and markets were going crazy (e.g., oil prices went negative) there were a lot of people panicing about their retirement savings. There was a lot of explaining to people that they should not liquidate their investments, but just to ride it out, and you'll be fine over the long run:

* https://awealthofcommonsense.com/2014/02/worlds-worst-market...

A lot of people also learned that they weren't as comfortable with the risk of being in 100% equities as they thought.

Another regular question in those forums "I got an inheritance and want to invest, but markets are at an all-time high." Well, the 'mathematically correct' answer would be to do a lump sum and put it in all at once:

* https://ofdollarsanddata.com/dollar-cost-averaging-vs-lump-s...

But most people aren't comfortable with that, so you tell them "DCA is fine" because waiting for the market to dip is worse than DCA:

* https://ofdollarsanddata.com/even-god-couldnt-beat-dollar-co...

> And your following “effect of QE” example is actually a great example of the problem: pretty much none of the people who made wrong prediction retracted themselves, most of them still believe they were right but the reality just happened to turn otherwise.

Yes. See also Flat Earthers. But their existence does not invalidate the fields geology or astronomy.

This is true in all sorts of areas in life. I live in Ontario, Canada and the provincial government made a controversial splash† recently about ripping out bikes lanes to put in more lanes to improve traffic flow, never mind the decades of data on the topic:

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Downs–Thomson_paradox

Do their actions invalidate the fields of urban planning and traffic engineering?

† It's really just a move to distract folks from incompetence on other topics.

> Yes. See also Flat Earthers. But their existence does not invalidate the fields geology or astronomy.

If flat earthers could become geology university professors then the field would be invalidated instantly, that's exactly my point!

Again the problem isn't that some people say wrong stuff, it's that you can spend your entire career saying fashionable bullshit that gets disproved over and over and face zero consequence in terms of academic reputation. This isn't what science is about, this field is still behaving with the ethos of political philosophy it is born from, not like a science even a social one (History is a good example of how you can do science on societies, and yes this is very different from physics in terms of what kind of knowledge it brings us, but so is biology).

> If flat earthers could become geology university professors then the field would be invalidated instantly, that's exactly my point!

Well then, better invalidate geology:

> Kurt Patrick Wise (born August 1, 1959) is an American geologist, paleontologist,[1] and young Earth creationist who serves as the director of the Creation Research Center at Truett McConnell University in Cleveland, Georgia. He writes in support of creationism and contributed to the Creation Museum in Petersburg, Kentucky.

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kurt_Wise

> Again the problem isn't that some people say wrong stuff, it's that you can spend your entire career saying fashionable bullshit that gets disproved over and over and face zero consequence in terms of academic reputation.

When there are enough folks who believe a certain thing there can be a 'critical mass' for it to become self-sustaining so that there may be consequences from outside the bubble, but the folks in question simply ignore the external groups and live in their own echo chamber. The funding for this can continue because—in the case of economics which touches on (e.g.) tax policy—when there are billions of dollars floating around, and you can fund bullshit so that you get to make more billions and keep more of your billions, there will also be "support" for ideas:

* https://www.newyorker.com/news/daily-comment/kochland-examin...

Why do we still hear about climate change not being real? Or that it's real, but not caused by humans? Is climatology a bullshit field? What consequences can there be when oil tycoons throw money at people to keep repeating the same message over and over? How many oil-funded think tanks are there that publish on climate change? Or billionaire-funded think tanks that publish on tax policy?

One reason why you continue to hear about invalid ideas is because to some people truth is irrelevant, reality is irrelevant. The only thing relevant to them is "what can I get?" and they're willing to continue to throw money at getting what they want, and they don't care what is said as long as it gets results:

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Firehose_of_falsehood

* https://www.rand.org/pubs/perspectives/PE198.html

Even medicine and biology has a bubble of folks that ignore reality:

* https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2024/dec/13/rfk-jr-aaron...

* https://archive.is/https://www.nytimes.com/2024/12/13/health...

Here we are in late-2024-going-into-2025 and we're still "debating" the benefits of polio vaccines.

You seem to think that the [Tt]ruth will overcome the [Ll]ies. Maybe. Eventually. But that is the optimistic take—and which I tend to lean towards as well—but I also recognize human psychology and human history, and know that humans can (and do) choose another path. There are plenty of things that true that people choose not to believe in or trust, even with the evidence staring them in the face.

In fact, showing people evidence often prevents people from changing their minds and they makes them dig into their (invalid) beliefs more:

* https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S000632072...

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Belief_perseverance

* https://today.uconn.edu/2022/08/cognitive-biases-and-brain-b...

You keep confusing fringes views by weirdos in various field (like your Kurt guy who “serves as the director of the Creation Research Center”) that the broad field regards with a mix of contempt and pity, and only exist because it benefits from backing from outside the science world (mostly for religious reasons), and economists where the same kind of people get the biggest number of citations in paper and are granted the most prestigious award (and where the said award is a counterfeit one, “Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Memory of Alfred Nobel” pretending to be a “Nobel prize”).

If you don't see the difference (and can't articulate your arguments without annoying walls of text), it's time to end this discussion.

Good day.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com