Why is it that in political science and commentary "populism" has turned into a swear word that is used to smear those...

>The elites know a great deal more about governance than the average person
This claim kind of falls flat on its face when you consider the fact that elites, much like Roman oligarchs, only seriously consider legislation that entrenches their position and grows their wealth.

That doesn’t really matter as long as everyone else benefits a little as well, no?

Obama was a populist and I liked him. Populism by itself is not bad, it's just that you shouldn't expect results from it.

When you appeal to the stupidity and general selfish, short term demands of a mob, you're in for a bad time.

"A little" is not enough. Globalism is the most egregious example. Sure, a consumer in the West got cheaper shit, but lost his job. When he complains pundits, journalists, entrenched politicians and globalist elites shriek about racism, nationalism, tribalism and nativism.

The point of democracy isn't to "let the people rule" or whatever, it's to ensure the peaceful transition of power.

In other regimes it has to be done regularly through a civil war, in a democracy it's just every few years in the urns.

You're implying that democracy is the greatest lie fed to the public.

I don't know that it's a lie. I mean there's a reason we call them "representative democracies" and not direct democracies.

You said the point of democracy is to hand the power from one member of the elite to the next. Elites demonstrably don't give a fuck about their nations or countrymen, so the whole representative democratic framework must be a lie.

Power has typically, historically and nearly always reverted to control by a group of elites with power and money. Populism threatens that status quo with instability no matter what flavour it comes in as.

That said, populism is often wielded by someone from the very same rich caste and appeals to people on the lowest common dominator. And they do it by offering stuff (pride/bread/money) and often blaming some X (foreigners/religion/rival elites).

It's not inherently a bad idea to introduce the idea but in the case of the Graccus for example. They were using populism to enhance their own prestige and power. The betterment of the roman people was an indirect benefit.

Often times populism leads to bad policies. Land grabs in Zimbabwae are an example.

It is also true that politicans and bureaucratic elites know more in running a country effectively (even if they dont do it) than a peasant on the streets.

A healthy society has powers in the hands of those with the skills in managing the state and the virtue of doing it for the betterment of the people. The people getting a way to voice their concerns in an unavoidable way that forces the elites to address the issues or at least explain clearly why it cant happen (Such as why welfare has to be reduced for the future health of the country).

Easier said than done

>The people getting a way to voice their concerns in an unavoidable way that forces the elites to address the issues or at least explain clearly why it cant happen
In modern representative democracies this does not happen. There is no meaningful way for a member of general public to voice his or her concerns about an issue. Even if he does, he gets ignored or belittled by the elites of the country. This arrogance andnd willfufull ignorance of the woes of the general population is what leads to populism.

>They were using populism to enhance their own prestige and power
Many Roman populists were cynical and insincere but I think the Graccus brothers were genuinely interested in fix the problems destroying Roman society even if they were happy to accrue the prestige and political power that came from doing that.

>They were using populism to enhance their own prestige and power. The betterment of the roman people was an indirect benefit.
Not everyone is as cynical and power hungry as you. Why would these brothers go against an entrenched elite if all they want is power? Especially if they were in high positions themselves?

They don't have to be elites. And I'm not as biased against them as you are, the common man is an asshole often enough. I don't think giving power to stupid assholes over educated assholes in an improvement.

Nixon came from poverty and made is way all the way to the top. Humble beginings didn't make him a good man.

You fucks venerate Roman populists but you'd have called them Marxist communists today.

How so? They mostly pushed for land redistribution, they didn't argue for public ownership in any way.

A lot of roman populists abdicated forcibly taking stuff from the public treasury or the elites to give to the poor. Even fucking Caesar built a lot of support by promising things like that.

Literally the ancient equivalent of raising taxes to increase welfare.

>Why is it that in political science and commentary "populism" has turned into a swear word that is used to smear those who do not fit into the political scientists' narrow specification of what's a "proper" politician?

Because proper politicians don't use public resources as an end for their own personal promotion to power

Populists just promise shit that appeals to the masses in forms of public expenditure, but at the expense of other people who do not care of the things populists promise

That isn't marxism.

Christian democrats and social democrats do that sort of thing sometimes.

Tax collection was already pretty much a shakedown of specific rich houses, anyway. They never really fixed their tributary system. Making being head of tax collection a position that was bought was pretty retarded.

>That isn't Marxism.

As aren't many things that people accused of being Marxists do, he did said "you would of called them Marxists", not "they were Marxists".

>Because proper politicians don't use public resources as an end for their own personal promotion to power

They shouldn't, but all career politicians do this.

>Populists just promise shit that appeals to the masses in forms of public expenditure, but at the expense of other people who do not care of the things populists promise

Literally all public projects are at the expense of people who don't care about them, this is why ancap autists cry about taxes.

Yea but the attitude is there. People like Gracchi brothers could probably be marxist if they were born now

Every citizen should own some means of production =/= means of production should be owned publicly.

They had the right idea. It was the only way to counter the propping up of bloated proto-welfare-states by rich houses that wanted to control the mobs and fight the ballooning unemployment crisis.

>muh evidence based policy
Easy way to spot an avaricious brainlet
Guess what: making money isn't the most important thing in the world

>They shouldn't, but all career politicians do this.

Not the case some 200 years ago. Now it devolved into careerism but this means only that the elites must be periodically purged and make room for growth, as it shakes the status quo and forces the leaders to obey the people that elected them

>Literally all public projects are at the expense of people who don't care about them, this is why ancap autists cry about taxes.

They are either expenses made for the better functioning of the nation and society, or not. In the later case, their political rule is unjustified and are eligible to be brought down by the nation's people.

Quite often though, the elites are fucking over everyone else as much as they can. It is only through public awaeness and pressure that things change for everyone and the self serving greedy fucks are forced to ease off a little.

No one really understands economics because it's a giant circle jerk of the same bunk ideas being parroted around using ever more complex language and erroneous math to cover up their failures.

What you really meant to say is that Economics is a pseudo-science.

I always find the idea that elites know how to run a nation better than the plebs while true a bit circular in nature. Often one of the complaints of the plebs is that government does not represent them because the elites have constructed a system which suppressed them.

Unlike economists I do not pass full judgment on things which I don't fully understand. I merely point out much of the modern field is filled with assertions of certainty when in reality they have nothing more than a conveniently fitted line, using software and math they don't even comprehend. I am almost certain that even the most basic mathematics behind the derivation of the "multiplier effect" so often utilized in simple macroeconomic analysis is beyond a far larger portion of economists than people realize.

So, what, we shouldn't listen to neuroscientists on brains because they don't understand them enough to read minds, or to physicists because there isn't a unifying theory, or to metereologist's because they don't get it right 100% of the time? Nobody can reasonably ask for perfect information on some things, but it is clear that some people have a better grasp than others, by which I mean they have more explanatory and predictive power - that isn't to say all economists are right all the time, but enough economists are right enough of the time that you should take into consideration their arguments and studies.

(OP)

You fags aren't populists, when was the last time you proposed inflation of the currency, silver standard instead of gold, and regulation of the railroad industry?

I'll wait, but not long.

You are comparing the hard sciences to one of the soft sciences.

Populist has a negative connotation because most populists are actually just con artists exploiting vulnerable people.

You base the distinction on what?

Is oncology a soft science because it has low predictive power? Because treatments aren't so consistently effective? Like in mental health practice?

Is ecology a soft science because it can't account for all change and factors in complex living systems, much like economy for markets?

There is no consensus on how to conciliate classic physics with quantum physicis. Are the physicists looking for a unifying theory soft scientists?

You've offered nothing but a set of false equalances and strawmanning. The foundation of many economic arguments validity is the math they use in a vain attempt to emulate theoretical physics. Math which they neither know nor properly understand most of the time. A neuroscientist does derive his validity on reading minds nor does physicist do so on the presumption of a unifying theory. They do so based on experimental results repeated dozens of times over.

Rather instead let us look at the windows of macroeconomics though the lense of theoretical physics. Both physicists and economists use mathematics, at times complex, to bolster, describe, and even form the crux of their arguments. Fine. But in physics if there is even a single section of your math you are not able to fully understand it's purpose or where it comes from your paper will be dumped as pseudo drivel even if it's "conclusion" is correct. Why? Because mathematics is a tool not a Magic Oracle, and if you do not understand how that tool came to be and limitations imposed on it you are liable to simply throw at anything to make things "work." In economics there is little understanding of what happens when some career academic plays with his software to create some interesting if useless correlation.

Moving further afield, even assuming the math is correct and understood by its author there is a difference in how a work is treated between the disciplines. Even the most mathematically sound paper is viewed with at best intrigue in the physics community. Excitement only comes when validation arrives from experimentation confirms the results. In economics when some new paper arrives from a "respected" author the paper is typically given some great acclaim and fanfare over it's "stunning" results when in reality the author has done nothing except create an interesting argument.

Medicine isn't science. And only Biologists consider biology to be a truly hard science. Most others consider it something in between at best.

True rigor is something which a person knows when they see it. If there is a question then that field is soft as mud.

>Medicine isn't a science.
Is there no theoretical or experimental backing for medicine that would be called scientific? What would you call the study of cancer, if not oncology? Or is cancer or any other subject hard to predict outside the purview of science?
>biolgy isn't a hard science
So the field that gaves us germ theory isn't hard science? It has done more for me than pure math, quantum physics or even computer sciences. If hardness, as you define it, isn't a measure of utility, why would calling economics a soft science be a critic against it?
>True rigor is something which a person knows when they see it.
That is a terribly subjective criteria for rigor. Please construe a better operational definition. That is a requirement for scientific rigor.
>If there is a question then that field is soft as mud.
You didn't reply to my points in regards to metereology and unifying theories for physics. There is much room for speculation in those fields. Does that detract from their hardness or utility?

I'm getting engineer vibes from you.

Reading minds was an oversimplification. It was meant to refer to how limited is the neuroscientist's ability to explain or predict everything that goes on in a brain.

You take a keen interest in physics, I'm guessing. How do you feel about metereology or climate science? Do you resent them not having a better grasp on mathematics as physicist's do? Or them not being able to put their theories to the test in labs or other controled environemnts? Metereologists and economists have to compare their models with the world outside their labs all the time. At best these fields can run computer simulations, to check out their logic and math. They can't built whole planets or whole markets in their labs.

Anything to do with human society or human mind is soft-science because it's basically impossible to get hard unquestionable data from it that remains consistent forever.

>Is there no theoretical or experimental backing for medicine that would be called scientific

Engineers employ scientific tools as well, but they are engineers not scientists. Medicine is an engineering of the body, whereby things are typically developed or studied with a goal in mind and through stochastic tinkering. I say this broadly, some in medicine are scientists, but most are engineers developing treatments or drugs of some kind.

>done more for me
Kindly go learn more about these subjects before blithering on with your stupidity. If utility was a measure of how scientific something was engineers would all be scientists. The difference between hard and soft is in the rigor of method and quality between fields. Mathematical rigor has traditionally been seen as a decent proxy though it is not the only rigor. To call something a soft science is to at best politely state that those fields "results" should be taken in with a healthy dose of skepticism. At worst it means the field and all that is in it, can never be wrong. That is to say it is so unscientific, their "results" cannot even be falsified.

>terribly subjective
Only an insecure hack desperately grasping for the security of well defined metrics to game would care for this. If you are confused as what rigor means from a scientific point Google it. From there it is easy to apply this rule of thumb: If there is even a question if a paper or field is truly "rigorous" then it probably isn't.

>If utility was a measure of how scientific something was engineers would all be scientists. The difference between hard and soft is in the rigor of method and quality between fields. Mathematical rigor has traditionally been seen as a decent proxy though it is not the only rigor. To call something a soft science is to at best politely state that those fields "results" should be taken in with a healthy dose of skepticism. At worst it means the field and all that is in it, can never be wrong. That is to say it is so unscientific, their "results" cannot even be falsified.
You argued against economics for it being a soft science. Then you implied biology was a less than hard science. If a non-hard science can still be more useful to society than a hard science, then what why would calling something a soft science be an argument against it?

>Only an insecure hack desperately grasping for the security of well defined metrics to game would care for this. If you are confused as what rigor means from a scientific point Google it. From there it is easy to apply this rule of thumb: If there is even a question if a paper or field is truly "rigorous" then it probably isn't.
Again, pharmacologists and metereologists, like most of what you'd call non-hard sciences, use degrees of statistical significance to draw conclusions (like p

>resent
I resent no one, merely dislike how some beleive that a piece of paper and fancy credentials somehow make their arguments impervious to error. Krugman comes out with a idea, any idea, and there is almost general applause and he is paraded in the papers. Any criticism is smothered with by ad hominids and references to his "Nobel." Hawking comes out with an idea, and another man engages him in a bet to prove him wrong for 7 years and wins.

As for the matter of meteorology and climate science, neither of them are Science as you use them. Predicting things using percentages in a chaotic system isn't really science, because in the end you're always right. For the more mundane non forecasting features of these Sciences I do not know enough about them to make a judgment. Though I am inclined to say yes in terms of meteorology.

>then what why would calling something a soft science be an argument against it?

Re read the second part of my post again. As for the rest of your post, Biology for all its lack is still easily falsifiable in most cases meaning you can trust it's results. The chasm between Biology and the true soft sciences in enormous.

>P value memes.
You have literally just proven me right invoking this. Go back to school kid.

Are you a libertarian or tankie per chance? The only other people I know that know of Krugman and feel he is wrong on the whole (he has a generally bad track record on seeing tech trends, granted) are dudes that argue for policy on grounds of moral principles with little care for comparative studies or history, and think Keynesians are either trying to subvert capitalism (the libertarian dude believed this) or staving off communist revolutions (the marxist dude believed this).

>p value is a meme
So I suppose you don't believe in pharmaceutical trials or genetic studies?

>Taco trucks on every corners
Lel

Why the fuck is there better political discussion here than on fucking /pol/?

pol is infested by normies, redditors and the worst types of mutts that were lured by elections

We have a greater distance from the issues we talk here on Veeky Forums than we do from current news. So it is easier for us to keep cool heads and harder for us to feel personally invested in our posts.

Why do you care if he doesn't subscribe to orthodox economics? Respond him properly.

I'm probably one of those normies that infested it although I don't post often. Was /pol/ like this in the past or is it just a good thread.

You're bullshitting, there are some shitposting threads that are even worse than /pol/.

Only once in a blue moon, user. Most of the time Veeky Forums is a joke board, but with dates. It's like people post here while drunk or something.

No you imbecile, the meme is in how you used them in your post. A.k.a how retard psychologists, sociologists, and academic hacks in general view them, something to draw conclusions from. It is the one thing they are not. To use a p value as anything for a substitute for sound judgement, and further experimenting is the height of deceit. They are a tool, one among many including your own judgement, to aid in the START of a research process not the justification itself. P values are a meme because they have been bastardized by so many people to turn their junk into gold.

I merely used Krugman as proxy. I could have any big name economist the result is the same. Monoculture. There is a reason why Krugman is only called out those on the "fringe," it is because economic academia discourages disagreement. Krugman is no Von Neumann or Ramanujan to warrant such incision in opinion.

Watergate Aside he was extremely competent, hell maybe even a "good" president. He was also the last real Republican president before Neo-liberal bankers took it over.

Krugman is also a joke in mainstream economics.

Personal curiosity. I'm not the first to see a trend between Veeky Forums memery and fringe views on politics and economics. Engineers made up a disproportionate portion of the Politburo and ISIS also has engineers over-represented in it's ranks. That is very interesting to me.

P value is used in statistical analysis of test results, it is certainly not used to "START" the research process. You'd already have theory and hypothesises (the stuff that justifies the experiment) before following with experiments, which would them be subjected to peer review and replication attempts.

There is plenty of conflicting views within ecomists, as with most social sciences. There are many different schools and they are very active in reviewing each others' work, probably more so than in other social sciences.

If you mean stuff like "why do nearly all economists think labour value theory sucks" it isn't so much that they are biased against Marx, it is that it that theory is really bad at explaining and predicting developments.

The war on drugs and digging himself deeper into vietnam make him a bad president in my book.

He ended the Vietnam war ya dunce. Nixon was a saint.

He had no choice by then!

nytimes.com/2016/12/31/opinion/sunday/nixons-vietnam-treachery.html

nixonboos BTFO

>it is certainly not used to "START" the research process.

en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Misunderstandings_of_p-values

It is. If you consider running an experiment doing some p value test and calling it a day you aren't a researcher you're a paper pusher.

>Peer review
Peer review is a glorified meme. It's just some guys glancing over your paper saying it "can" be published. It says nothing about the papers rigor or its validity.

>Conflicting views
Different schools are not conflicting views they are cyclos of homogenized thought.

medium.com/incerto/inequality-and-skin-in-the-game-d8f00bc0cb46

Skip to the part about Pikkety and the Mandarin class. That is all I care about and all you should as well. It tells you everything you need to know about economists and how the operate.

That meeting wouldn’t have ended the Vietnam war anyways, the dude Nixon sent the message too was already planning on not attending.

>Merkel
>neoliberalism
>globalism
>RADICAL CENTRISM (WHAT - THE - FUCK - IS - THAT ???)
>Trudeau
A big bait

You didn't adress my point that before going into the lab you start with theory (literaturereview) and hypothesis. And the drugs that can save your life probably had their efficacy checked by running t-tests for independent samples (control group vs. experimental group) coupled with p-value analysis to check if the difference between groups was statistically significant.

Peer review also refers to you having your paper out there where the community (your peers) can read your arguments and check your findings.

>Taleb
Ugh, one guy writes a couple of books on basic cognitive biases and he now he knows better than every other statiscian and economist. He raises good points that others had already raised on marxism (though he uses them against civil service in general, it seems, and don't say I'm off topic he uses "mandarin class" to refer to these type of clerks) but goes on to bend backwards the based private sector man. Of course, him making his money from casino capitalism, inclusive moving around the sort of derivatives that caused the 2008 crisis didn't make him biased, unlike those public sector crooks. And he complains about others not considering his points as well as he thinks they should, but dismisses all arguments by his statiscian peers against his own most proeminent book as worthless.

He also doesn't adress Krugman's points. He offers a different take on why some economic systems would be better than others relating to social mobility, expects us to accept that a society where more people have a better chance of becoming rich and the rich have a better chance of being power is better than a society with more wealth for more people. That is just something I had to put here because it riles me up. I don't want a bigger pie, or a "fair" shot at getting a bigger slice of the pie than others will get, or that everyone gets the same size slice: I want more people to have more pie.

>Different schools are not conflicting views they are cyclos of homogenized thought.
Actually, them never agreeing anything with each others is one of the issues that makes it hard for economics to be considered a science, or something that is more or less grounded in reality (or even have any foundations to begin with). It's full of arbitrary assumptions and make-believe, either thinking them as a law of human nature or as ethics. Libertarianism is the most guilty of that kind of make-believe play.

>You didn't adress my point that before going into the lab you start with theory (literaturereview) and hypothesis

This is quite far from the reality. In most cases you have some vague idea that doing X will result in some interesting but not fully known Y. You then (if used properly) use p values after an experiment to see if there is even the hint of something there as well as any other tools you have to gain an insight into various matters. What happens in many softer less rigorous fields such as psychology and sometimes even biology, is that fools ignorant of how p values came to be, merely trained as monkeys to punch numbers into a formulae, crunch their data blindly get a "significant result" and rush to print. Rampant failure in the understanding of the very math they use to validate their own results is why psych papers have such problems with replication.

>Ugh, one guy writes a couple of books on basic cognitive biases and he now he knows better than every other statiscian and economist.

Again you prove to me just how much of a circle jerk the softer fields are. You cannot refute the mathematics of his argument or even grasp what his real argument is, so you immediately switch over to his private beliefs use that to detract from his argument. Talab's point was that the book he refuted wasn't just wrong, it could not even be CONSIDERED wrong because the mathematical tools used to analyze data were not suited to the data set at all. In soft fields the validity of ideas are highly linked to the prestige of their authors within the in group. In hard fields the validity of ideas rest upon evidence and rigor. It should not matter what the fuck Taleb's opinion on anything is, the counter paper he wrote is mathematiclly solid and can and should only be refuted with mathematical arguments because it is about the nature of measuring and data analysis. Go study a field softer than pudding for a year.

>It's full of arbitrary assumptions and make-believe, either thinking them as a law of human nature or as ethics

That was my point.