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Comment by mwkaufma | Hacker News Reader

Freakonomics: laundering conservative talking-points into "the npr set" for 20 years and still going.

A broken clock is right twice a day. America has some of the highest numbers of lawyers per capita by far out of developed nations. These lawyers do not work for us, most middle and low income people do not get legal representation that they need at all. You learn where these lawyers actually work when you work in corporate, and you see quickly how this single department has complete unilateral control over all operations of the organization. Everything goes through them and they can shut down anything. Even directives by the chief executive officer who is supposedly at the helm are crafted by legal.

And when you understand that the american government is controlled by corporations, given the above logic that really means it is controlled by their lawyers. Most politicians in representative government come from law backgrounds as well.

Law is central to government. It makes sense for most politicians to have a background in law as opposed to, for an extreme example, real estate.

Is this the reason that America still doesn't have a national abortion law and had to rely on a sentence?

Yup, a lot of engineers here letting their egos be stroked. "Lawyers are bad people unlike me, a noble and rational engineer. If I controlled the government I would do things right, because I'm an engineer."

And as further evidence, this idea was already tried in the Soviet Union and it did not produce benevolent leaders free from human failings.

Any lawyer you personally know will tell you they are not qualified at all to even opine outside their very specific niche in the law. Merely being a lawyer does not mean you are qualified for office. I would argue the most qualified people for office are the aides and clerks for existing politicians who have spent years working in the sausage factory already. I would argue committee and cabinet appointments are generally terrible because once again, lawyers are chosen to run certain domain specific committees mainly for political reasons rather than domain experts from a given industry. See what happens when we get a laywer as the secretary of health and human services rather than a credible immunologist.

Lawyers approach arguments from both sides (so that they know where they are weak, where they are strogon), and know how to identify/tear apart BS. Engineers know how to present 'the correct position' once. The best engineers I knew benefited from having someone else in the company do their 'political' work for them. They were horrible at it themselves.

Uhh that is grossly simplifying the scientific process. How do you think they arrive at 'the correct position?' Empirically testing alternative hypotheses. It is lawyers that need to win once and just slip something past a judge. Engineering 'truths' if you could call them that are constantly reevaluated in light of new evidence, theory, and data.

This is why everyone should have at least a basic education in materialist analysis. Our material relations dictate the structure of society, not the other way around. China is a manufacturing economy, that's why it's run be engineers, and America is built on exploiting the productive capacity of the rest of the world, so of course there's lots of lawyers.

Are you implying that left wing ideas are always correct, and right wing ideas are always wrong? That seems very naïve, no?

The conservatives I know think it’s another mainstream democratic mouthpiece.

So I guess they’re doing something right.

No, just sounds like you know some dense conservatives.

I am not sure this makes conservatives sound great. They talk about how absolutely self-defeating Trump's policies are towards reshoring efforts. Freakonomics seems pretty genuinely centrist to me.

If you think Chicago School economics is centrist, then "centrist" is just another word for conservative.

Instead of classifying everything on a line to rhetorically suggest that you are objectively in the middle, recognize that there is a broad landscape of social, cultural, and economic positions.

Trump in fact acts contrary to most recommendations from Chicago economists, even though both are “conservative”.

You're misreading between the lines. I'm objectively on the left. As I understand things, there is no "line" and no "middle", except for media-types dispatched to hype the status-quo.

Then why are you surprised that a podcast/book about economics represents the dominant academic view of economics?

> dominant academic view of economics

Chicago School is the conservative view of economics, not the dominant view.

Would you say freakeconomics is presenting heterodox economic theory? And if so how?

Nondominant != heterodox.

Ok. I think this is becoming a pretty strained argument.

Leftists don’t generally like mainstream economics and subscribe to more niche segments. That’s ok - and there is a lot to criticize. But it’s also wrong that freakeconomics is peddling “conservative ideas” unless you do agree economics itself as an academic field is conservative coded.

this is wrong for economics. The dominant view among economists is largely homogenous.

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