Economics is a historically flawed and ideological science. But I think it’s getting better and more empirical with time. The scientific method works, economists just have the come down from their high horses and actually follow the data.
this post was submitted on 20 May 2025
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That's easy to say when your mortgage doesn't depend on the Emperor's New Clothes being real. Many if not most economists have staked their reputations and networks on pre-empiricism economics.
It's not a simple matter of "whoops I was wrong about one thing". Since the 1970s we've turned the world economy upside-down to cater to billionaires and inequality has skyrocketed. It would be like a priest admitting he reassigned molesters for decades.
OK but you can’t treat economists as a monolith. If you want to shame the people who did that then go ahead, but I think there’s a newer group of economists who are deconstructing the propaganda and seeking truth, and they should be encouraged.
based. and it’s a weird situation because economists deal with money and money corrupts so there are fallible incentives. just see how trump awarded arthur laffer for his negligible contribution just because his model was convenient for rich people: https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/trump-to-award-presidential-medal-of-freedom-to-economist-art-laffer-today/2019/06/19/f1505826-9299-11e9-aadb-74e6b2b46f6a_story.html
The real question is why we even bother discussing a curve which was pulled out of the ass of a man who went on to invent a hydralic computer to model the national economy of the United Kingdom. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phillips_Machine
I think his greatest achievement was to demonstrate the concept of being a really clever idiot.
There is more to economics than Milton Friedman. Marx was a pioneer in economics and leftest theory has been robust in the field from the beginning.
Criticizing soft sciences for their estrangement from mathematics is classic antiintellectualism. The same logic would demand the disillusion of psychology, sociology, and all the critical theories that are the foundation of modern leftest thought.
You miss the point that the soft sciences are being used as an excuse for bad policy. If the soft sciences informed a model for good policy this post wouldn’t exist but instead we have the Laffer curve and trickle down economics.
No one here is calling for a disillusion of economics. It just needs to be used appropriately instead of as a voodoo magic to transfer wealth upwards.
Economics is best understood as a priesthood, similar in purpose to haruspicy. Once you make that mental adjustment, everything they do, the types of employment they get, the vile drippings they emit, it all makes horrible, horrible sense.
The second graph is a fucking terrible graph as none of the data points correlate with a specific time which would be needed to make a proper comparison to the graph on the left.
If you thought this made sense you are mistaken. OP likely knows fuckall about economics
Alright, why do we need the timestamp on the second graph? They appear to show the same axes and the first graph makes no mention of time-dependence.
If it's an attempt at amogus, it sucks too
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Economists are the priests of capitalism.
I have examined the ~~goat entrails~~ quarterly metrics and determined that ~~gods~~ markets require more ~~human sacrifices~~ corporate tax breaks
Only tangentially related, but it's often accepted that there is no Nobel prize in economics. There is a Nobel memorial prize in economics (link), but as it was set up after Nobel's death it is in a slightly different category.
Economics is a subset of moral philosophy, which just happens to care a lot about mathematics but is (or should be) nonetheless primarily concerned with questions of morality.
not sure i agree per se but im willing to hear more?
maybe you mean to distinguish between economics as a study and economics as a mode of policy