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Comment by jaredklewis | Hacker News Reader

There is basically no overlap between the things that economists generally say are good (free trade, carbon taxes, cap-and-trade, immigration, land value taxes, organ trade, congestion pricing, etc…) and the things that populists of either the left or right say are good (rent control, price controls, tariffs, wealth taxes, debt relief, minimum parking requirements, etc…).

Why would you (or anyone) be surprised that economically sound policies are not popular? They are not popular in the US. They are not popular in Europe. They’re not even popular on HN.

For reasons I don’t understand, almost everyone hates economics.

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Economics is usually optimising for a narrow utility function, usually something to do with price discovery, but that doesn’t normally align with more human societal goals. Take, say, surge pricing. Maybe without surge pricing you pay $60 for a taxi but have to wait 30 mins when it’s busy. With surge pricing at busy times it’s $120, so people who can afford $120 wait 0 minutes but people who can only afford $60 have to wait 2 hours for surge pricing to end. “Economists generally” would say surge pricing was better, but voters and politicians are considering the wider trade off of whether it’s fair some people get to jump the queue and some people have to wait longer. There’s also usually a bait-and-switch where the people having to wait 2hrs are told that the $120 will generate more in taxes so if they vote for surge pricing they’d actually be better off, then the $120 is spent lobbying to ensure the taxes never materialise.

Because the economy doesn’t work for the average citizen, the economy works to make the numbers bigger

Well, those numbers economists are working to make bigger are often things that help the average citizen, like the median household income income, the median life expectancy, or the literacy rate. Sometimes economists are studying how to make numbers lower as well, like the median cost of housing or inflation.

good for whom?

Economics are hated because economical arguments are used to justify why we cannot do the necessary things all while doing things that bail out the rich for the tenth time.

You don't need to be an economist to realize who is getting fucked over. I am not from the US, but a vote for Trump for many was just a vote to burn it all down, especially because the other candidate was perceived to standing for perpetuating the status-quo.

I am not saying I like Trump. In 2016 when he was running for the first time I stood behind the back then very unpopular opinion that he is a fascist and I would have loved to have been wrong about it.

Economists claim to be like physicists, neutral and just observing, but somehow the economically benefitial measures always benefit the few at the cost of the many. Now that has nothing to do with economics per se. Marx was an economist after all. It has to do with how economics are used by the political class.

I have an interest in econophysics and what people think of as "economics" is mostly bullshit.

David Ruelle put it best in 1991 when he summed up economics as "We don't currently have the tools to properly study this subject". 35 years later we only have slightly better tools.

Economist here. (Started as programmer, worked in finance, got Masters in Econ.) Econ is a big field. I think it knows a lot at the microeconomics level. There are impressive mathematical tools and economists have found “natural experiments” which test causality.

Macroeconomists don’t know much at all. We can’t even create artificial economies - the agent-based simulations have dozens of parameters and our tools are bad at studying those imperfect fake economies.

I’ve looked a bit into econophysics. They seem more on the path to getting somewhere. But it’s still a long road.

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