I refuse to believe economists have the best of intentions in mind when they write in absolutes lol. Too many refuse to factor human costs and irrationality into their calculations, Friedman being one of main examples.
I’m sure there are economists that do, but the few I’ve spoken to talk about people abstractly and as expendables.
Yeah it’s batshit that an economist won a nobel prize for his theory that people don’t act 100% rationally so that’s why economic models were failing to predict reality.
Like, I’m sure it wasn’t obvious and I’m not trying to sound like I’m smarter than economists, but holy fuck duh
My economics teacher would publicly fellate Alan Greenspan in class. Cue the subprime mortgage crisis and Mr Greenspan is out there going “I didn’t account for bankers being stupid and greedy.”
duckduckgo’d: ‘economist won a nobel prize for his theory that people don’t act 100% rationally so that’s why economic models were failing’
results was this:(theconversation(dot)com link), so I guess Richard Thaler is who you’re looking for.
It’s even worse than that it’s not even just the irrationally that’s unaccounted for. It’s also that people rationally optimize for variables that are disregarded. Neoclassical economics takes obviously falsifiable assumptions as axioms. It’s brutally stupid shit. No amount of numbers attached to it would make it work if those axioms are wrong. Yet it’s been used to enact major economic policy all over the world. Including “shock therapy” that got applied to many countries around the world, such as my country of origin where that led to dramatic drop in GDP, standard of living, life expectancy, more than a decade of poverty and a 20% population exodus. People like to badmouth Psychology as a shit science, boy, Psychologists check their results a lot more than these folks.
It’s like people are the ones doing the things that create an economy so economists should be integrating the study of human psychology into economic theory.
Which, to the credit of the discipline seems to be happening finally (at least more than it was in the past).
Oh yes. But more generally there’s a significant need for empiricism. Not just on the psychology of the economic individual. For example the fact that MMT’s empirical observations of reality aren’t mainstream yet is staggering. If empiricism was a mainstay or economics, these observations would have been tested and accepted if not falsified in the 90s or 2000s. Yet you have a country like the UK devastated by austerity following the great recession because that didn’t happen.
I refuse to believe economists have the best of intentions in mind when they write in absolutes lol. Too many refuse to factor human costs and irrationality into their calculations, Friedman being one of main examples.
I’m sure there are economists that do, but the few I’ve spoken to talk about people abstractly and as expendables.
Yeah it’s batshit that an economist won a nobel prize for his theory that people don’t act 100% rationally so that’s why economic models were failing to predict reality.
Like, I’m sure it wasn’t obvious and I’m not trying to sound like I’m smarter than economists, but holy fuck duh
My economics teacher would publicly fellate Alan Greenspan in class. Cue the subprime mortgage crisis and Mr Greenspan is out there going “I didn’t account for bankers being stupid and greedy.”
Hahaha that’s fantastic! Do you remember who it was? I’d love to read about this…
duckduckgo’d: ‘economist won a nobel prize for his theory that people don’t act 100% rationally so that’s why economic models were failing’ results was this:(theconversation(dot)com link), so I guess Richard Thaler is who you’re looking for.
It’s even worse than that it’s not even just the irrationally that’s unaccounted for. It’s also that people rationally optimize for variables that are disregarded. Neoclassical economics takes obviously falsifiable assumptions as axioms. It’s brutally stupid shit. No amount of numbers attached to it would make it work if those axioms are wrong. Yet it’s been used to enact major economic policy all over the world. Including “shock therapy” that got applied to many countries around the world, such as my country of origin where that led to dramatic drop in GDP, standard of living, life expectancy, more than a decade of poverty and a 20% population exodus. People like to badmouth Psychology as a shit science, boy, Psychologists check their results a lot more than these folks.
It’s like people are the ones doing the things that create an economy so economists should be integrating the study of human psychology into economic theory.
Which, to the credit of the discipline seems to be happening finally (at least more than it was in the past).
Oh yes. But more generally there’s a significant need for empiricism. Not just on the psychology of the economic individual. For example the fact that MMT’s empirical observations of reality aren’t mainstream yet is staggering. If empiricism was a mainstay or economics, these observations would have been tested and accepted if not falsified in the 90s or 2000s. Yet you have a country like the UK devastated by austerity following the great recession because that didn’t happen.
The same can be said for most professions when they think in terms of absolutes.
The world isn’t binary, and treating it in those terms almost always creates worse outcomes.
Joseph Stiglitz