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