HN discussions are predictable:
Sure, it's paid by the Swedish central bank instead of the Nobel foundation, and it wasn't established by Alfred Nobel himself. Nobody cares. Value of such awards depends entirely on peer recognition, not on who pays or what exact labels they carry. Selection for economics is done by the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences, like the other science awards.
"Nobody cares" gotcha. Greed never cares.
And those who pay the piper call the tune.
Hence the brand of 'economics' that gets the gong.
EDIT: apparently not. I would rather you explain to me why than downvote mindlessly.
It's a field which is mostly interested in models and anyone can agree that a model is consistant and implies surprising things even if they think the hypotheses it makes don't faithfully represent reality.
It's endlessly fascinating to me how some people will happily disparage economics while having very little idea of what it's actually about.
The non-mainstrean economists (aka heterodox, aka cranks) are usually more obviously pursuing an agenda, but they definitely usually don't have better empirical evidence.
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Mate, this is not physics. This is not a field with a measurable reality where you can, in fact, say that those who reject the empirical evidence are cranks. Economics allows for multiple incompatible interpretations of the same empirical observations.
Economics has several characteristics that make it unlike other sciences: basically the "underlying observable" is not an objective thing with an independent existence; unlike an atom, the object of economics changes when it's being studied and changes with the underlying changes in political and economic structure. Even its aims are open for discussion! Economics has more in common with sociology or philosophy than any of the hard sciences.
It's easy to see, if nothing else, because economic theories fall in and out of fashion just like political ideologies do.
I think it's perfectly fine to disagree with non-mainstream economics, or to criticise it on some concrete grounds. But to pretend anyone who disagrees with $current_view is a crank... Well it's symptomatic of the quasi-orwellian reality which certain sectors want to impose: it's not enough to say "ours is the right way", they want to say "ours is the only possible way".
It doesn't really change anything to their inherent value that you build them from the hypotheses up or from the conclusions down. It holds the same that this set of interactions lead to this behaviour.
Sometimes going down can be equally interesting: "What would a system where tariff improves the overall well being of a country inhabitants look like?". Contrast the model requirements with empirical data and you have an interesting paper.
And please do me the favour of not assuming I "have very little idea of what it's actually about". It's contrary to the site guidelines (and it's very annoying).
> concensus in Economics
That's what I was talking about. This "consensus" is completely made-up and propped up by, among others, the Sveriges Riksbank. To the point that there are people like you who feel they should defend them against the evil "authoritarian Socialist", because of course, as we all know, that's all there is besides Neoliberalism. I sincerly hope you consider broadening your horizons, maybe start by Thomas Piketty's work: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Piketty
I made no such claim. I don't take issue with that list: the US by far leads in number of high‐profile economic researchers, high publication output, large number of employed economists.
Just as Mathematics is still Mathematics in the rest of the world, the broad perspective on Economics is not meaningfully different in the rest of the world. Even if it originated in the anglo-sphere, it's global. That's the point I made.
> This "consensus" is completely made-up and propped up by, among others, the Sveriges Riksbank.
Leading Economists globally find consensus on all manner of policy issues. Many academic papers model the effects of tariffs on prices, welfare, and the consensus is that tariffs generally harm consumers. Surveys conducted on Economists show strong consensus there.
> because of course, as we all know, that's all there is besides Neoliberalism
It's not a long list. Even Social Democracy darlings of Europe are effectively just Liberal with a bit more spending. Incidentally, France is in deep trouble because of this. Their public spending as a % of GDP far exceeds peers.
> maybe start by Thomas Piketty's work: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Piketty
Piketty is decidedly heterodox, and I've read Capital in the 21st Century, though not his latest which as I understand revisits much of the same. Wealth taxes have been tried in several countries including Austria, and promptly dropped. That's because they do not work well. It's difficult to implement and the returns just aren't good.
oh spare me. Social sciences are inherently political. They've always been political and they will always be political. Denying merely makes it worse. that's how you end up with the racialist anthropology of the 19th and early 20th centuries.
Don't hang a picture of a dog turd on your front door and cry about all the people pointing it out.
The other solution would he some equivilent of a community note for it every year, it seems like things work as is though.
Economics violates Popper demarcation criterion. Economic theories can't be falsified because you can't run controlled experiments on economies, rewind history, or isolate variables.
When models fail, economists adjust assumptions ...
Unfalsifiable = Unscientific.
Rejecting Popper for that is like rejecting reasoning itself because you can’t run a control experiment on it...but then one turns into an economist...
And if the source of that framework is not (part of your definition of) science, how do we know whether that framework is true?
That was sort of my point: Poppers criterion is nice, but only works for a small subset of (natural) science - and even there has to face criticism because it is simply too naive for many edge cases.
In category theory terms, it’s a type error, applying a rule defined within a system to the meta-level that defines the system itself.
When models fail, physicist adjust hypotheses ...
If these were economists, they would check if their equations match the economic universe they live in. :-) Instead, they conclude the agents just “did not behave rationally enough”.
Not really my experience with economics - a lot of awareness of reality vs model (regardless of how "beautiful" they are).
At the risk of being inflammatory-- These arguments are the equivalent of saying that Newton didn't really do physics because his models of mechanics break down at high enough speeds and small enough scales.
I genuinely have no idea why so many commenters on HN will spout nonsense based on high school curriculum with the confidence of a PhD when it comes to economics, but won’t embarrass themselves in other fields.
Yes, economics—particularly microeconomics—is constantly subject to experimentation. Macroeconomics is closer to astronomy, in that models are developed, novel data sources sought, old models tested and then validated or rejected. Also like astronomy, or perhaps more accurately fundamental physics, it’s currently off in a loop of DSGE optimizations which are mathematically pretty for the field but not super interesting outside it. (This work is not in that category.)
Macroeconomics isn’t like astronomy :-) Stars don’t change behavior when you model them. Economies do. There are no stable primitives, no conservation laws, just shifting behavior and feedback loops.
DSGE models are equilibrium sandcastles calibrated to past data. In physics that’s failure while in macro it’s tenure.
Economics is interesting and sometimes useful but calling it an experimental science is self-flattery.
“One thing we are not going to have, now or ever, is a set of models that forecasts sudden falls in the value of financial assets.”
-- Robert E. Lucas
"As a policy-maker during the crisis, I found the available models of limited help. In fact, I would go further: in the face of the crisis, we felt abandoned by conventional tools."
-- Jean-Claude Trichet - https://www.ecb.europa.eu/press/key/date/2010/html/sp101118.en.html
"How Conventional Wisdom Failed Us" - https://youtu.be/c8LMWCko4d0?t=138...you can't rerun the universe under controlled experiments. That's the whole point of the "controlled" part. It's an artificially isolated environment designed to model a specific phenomenon.
If you want examples of thoroughly experimental economic disciplines, look to auction, bargaining and game theory.
> Macroeconomics isn’t like astronomy :-) Stars don’t change behavior when you model them. Economies do
Stars don't change, but the ways we look at them do. This sort of endogeneity in data collection and research methods is a constant source of noise and errors in the physical sciences.
You're correct in that it's much more pronounced in economics, since humans are agents. That puts boundaries on how much one can predict. But that doesn't make it unknowable through the scientific method.
> DSGE models are equilibrium sandcastles calibrated to past data. In physics that’s failure while in macro it’s tenure
I'm not going to defend DSGE any more than I will string theory. (I know a lot more about the former to be able to properly critique it than I do the latter.)
> Economics is interesting and sometimes useful but calling it an experimental science is self-flattery
I'm not an economist. But I apparently know more economics than a lot of people who make confident statements on this board about the field.
Several fields of economics are rigorously empirical. Others are strictly observational. And others are total nonsense. The fill of nonsense is higher than other fields, but that's mostly due to the relevance of the work. If the rise and fall of nations rode on the spectral pattern of Sagittarius A*, you'd probably have a lot of nonsense work around that, too.
Supposing it did was fairly predictable that not setting money on fire would help recovery, what does it matter that there is no controlled scientific experiment involved? Or to put it another way, are there no facts to be gleaned from data?
You're deflecting. Curtailing inflation was an outcome of policy. The U.S. had fuck-all to do with it. Unless you're willing to acknowledge something so basic there's nothing else to say to someone disinterested in good faith discussion
Whether that's maintainable long term is probably the decisive judgement. Argentina has had many cycles of hyperinflation, reset, hyperinflation again. The current bailout is not exactly a positive indicator.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Econometrics
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Credibility_revolution
Economists are practically the only social scientists capable of doing this (even if it involves a lot of rainfall IVs). Everyone else p-hacks and calls it a day.
They seem rigid enough to be useful, but I hope they can be done better. Perhaps using better simulation tools.
Fun fact: The neoclassical economic school managed to remove the word "political" from "political economy" at the turn of the 20th century.
If anything, we're seeing the opposite results, where economists publish influential papers demographics, crime and social structure.
"When dealing with humans, linear regression is going to be good enough" is a huge assumption to make.
And if you're going to claim that economists are publishing influential papers in other fields - and especially if you're claiming that they're doing so in an unprecedented way, with no inter-disciplinary collaboration - please provide some examples. And if you're thinking of Freakonomics, know that no researcher takes Freakonomics seriously, and neither should you.
As for sociologists "invading" economics, they sort of are. Economics and sociology have quite a bit of overlap, and researchers from the two fields often collaborate. And any group researching economic phenomena, even an inter-disciplinary one involving sociologists, would be identified as economists, not sociologists, by people reading their work. Although David Graeber, an anthropologist, did write an excellent book on economic phenomena in "Debt: the first 5000 years", and it has done quite well. You could say that it's "influential".
Unfortunately, neoclassical economics also has wide political support among the people it benefits: wealthy people and institutions, e.g. banks. Which also means they get bankrolled (hah) much more than other social scientists, which means they get preferential treatment. E.g., this very "Nobel prize" in economy that this theead is about is funded by a bank.
The force to change economics qould have to come from within economics, perhaps from behavioural economics, or new Keynesian economics (the first one seems more promising), or even from movements like degrowth or circular economics. You can't expect a sociologist to fix a different field, and that wasn't the point. The point was simply that sociology doesn't suffer this embarassment because they are not burdened by ideological pressure backed by monies interest.
But since you asked, here's an accessible overview: https://francescosyloslabini.info/2016/06/01/neoclassical-ec...
https://replicationnetwork.com/2021/01/06/reed-the-state-of-... -- "indeed, there has been an increase in the number of replications over time. "
https://www.banque-france.fr/en/publications-and-statistics/... -- "First, we find a moderate replication success, in spite of a data availability policy."
But still, that is interesting. Thank you for taking the time. Although you first source is a survey of expectations by authors on replicability over time, not an actual measurement of replicability.
Your second reference says there are historically more replication studies being published now than before (people trying to replicate other studies), not that more studies replicate.
As you might be aware of, the number of scientific publications in general is growing, so I would also expect the subset if replication studies to grow. This is not very surprising or meaningful, but interesting.
The third one is actually about reproducibility, the authors have taken open data sets published together with papers and see if they can produce the figures and final values in the papers from the original data sets. That is an entirely different thing.