Is Economics a real science? The whole thing feels like obvious shit everyone already knows.
Is Economics a real science? The whole thing feels like obvious shit everyone already knows
Logan Kelly
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Cameron Anderson
Does science have to be perplexing?
Evan Baker
it isn't science because it isn't investigating the physical universe, it is investigating some purely man-made, contrived system.
just because you're attempting to study something carefully doesn't mean you are doing science.
someone could very carefully study final fnatasy 7 but they would not be doing science
Tyler Thompson
>it isn't science because it isn't investigating the physical universe
lol that's not how it works
Andrew Cox
Microeconomics, at least in my opinion, is a respectable science. Macroeconomics, on the other hand, is basically a shitfield that doesn't and can't really predict anything in a formally scientific fashion.
Nathaniel Howard
yes it is.
go cry about it while you do "research" on which equipment in Monster Hunter increases your rare drop rate.
Connor Gonzalez
Sure seems scientific.
Jack Adams
It's not a science. It is more of a priesthood, their job is to provide justifications for the policies their masters pay for.
Take for example the Efficient Market Hypothesis. The creator of course understood it can't exist in real world and said as much. Yet they kept repeating that it has tons of evidence.
Same with austerity. Varoufakis has reported that the ruling members of the EU knew it can't work. But they had political reason to push austerity, so they used economics to ustifyy mathematically impossible arguments.
Carson Sanchez
You know how when you're first learning things in physics (or any other science, really) you make assumptions like "assume this surface is frictionless" or "assume there is no air resistance." You know these things are absurd, and you're never led to believe you will encounter them in the real world; but they help make equations and models less messy so you can focus on the core concepts. Later on, once you've mastered these concepts, you start reintroducing things like friction, air resistance and other factors, and the models you learn about grow increasingly complicated and more and more closely fit the real world.
The problem with economics is that it never throws away those assumptions. Vast amounts of work has been done, and is still being done, under assumptions like perfectly competitive markets and perfectly rational agents, which are demonstrably inaccurate, and wildly so at times Economists don't let that phase them. They just keep chugging along with their theory-induced blinkers on, unable or unwilling to admit when their predictions don't line up with reality.
That's what make economics unscientific to me. It seems to have lost the feedback loop that is necessary in science, where real-world deviations from the theory give rise to adjustments in the theory. It seems as if economists would prefer a clean, pretty model that they can analyse and wank over than a model that actually describes reality.
Christopher Rivera
Are you implying that human behavior is not something which arises directly from the physical universe?
Jackson Rodriguez
Good post
Owen Bailey
90% of economics is just a math that they pretend is a science.
Macroeconomics is actually very useful and topical and helps you understand how the world works. Macroeconomics is a science, beyond a shadow of a doubt.
Microeconomics is some stupid bullshit mixture of Philosophy and Mathematics. It's not science, it damn well isn't science, because they don't do any empirical research. They handwave that away by saying they're a "social science" and so it's "impossible" to do any real investigation. Shit like the Law of Supply and Law of Demand aren't really laws at all. They're just arbitrary axioms a bunch of morons made up. Nothing about Microeconomics actually has applicability in real life, beyond the absolute smallest of scales and the most controlled of situations.
When you listen to a person talk about anything Microeconomic, they might as well be a first-year Philosophy student going, "whoa, my professor told us that we don't even know how to define what a chair is....". Macroeconomics is more respectable and tangible, but it's also so complex and random that a 1st-year could easily argue with a Ph.D about any arbitrary issue.
Noah Bell
Kek'd.
Nathaniel Lewis
Assumptions are not always constant in many econometric techniques and theories. Alternate theories that do not rely on assumptions are out there, but they are usually not taught at lower level undergrad classes, if they're even taught at undergrad at all. How much economics have you taken?
Nicholas Parker
Fields within micro are scientific or approximare science, while others are masturbatory mathematics where a bunch of theorems are proven given base assumptions but no one gives a shit if they actually correspond to human behavior.
Macro is not a science. Look at that shit Romer just put out.
Adam Brooks
Economics is applied logic.
Josiah Brooks
Maybe, but the application of logic to human behavior in collectives don't always produce reliable models.
I would really like to see an examination of how often circumstances in the real world conform to even the most basic principals of microeconomics.
Camden Miller
No, but we are trying.
Jeremiah Cook
Economics PhD here (in Macro). Agreed that a lot of Economics is circlejerking with maths, but this is a far bigger problem for Micro than Macro. The Macro approach is to look at empirical observations and try to explain them (often using models), whereas in Micro it's often done in reverse (that is, coming up with some axioms and theorems and then either ignoring empirical evidence or trying to shoehorn it in somehow).
Regarding assumptions, any half-decent university will already teach you in early undergrad courses that most assumptions (like perfect competition) are too strong and irrepresentative of reality, and how they can be replaced with more realistic assumptions instead. However, it's very often the case that changing strong underlying assumptions has surprisingly minimal impact on model dynamics and their conclusions.
I am currently teaching both an undergrad and a graduate course on (central) banking. The graduate course uses more sophisticated, but still simple models to explain how central banks adjust their policies to influence inflation rates. Just for the heck of it, I've modified the graduate model in numerous ways to make it more realistic (e.g., adding frictions to the labour market; including spillover effects between countries; making the population less rational and more prone to errors; making more diverse and volatile financial markets; etc) and in none of the cases did the effects of interest change in a notable way.
Models are often seemingly very simplistic, because they're used as a baseline on which you can build forth.
Any Micro theory that doesn't use something like bounded rationality is full of shit, though. Even basic principles like the axiom of transitivity are often violated in real life, so that shit needs to be dropped.
Macro's biggest problem is that everyone (including laymen) think they know precisely how it all works, which makes politics seep into it.
Angel Williams
Does it lack falsifiability?
Yes
Does it lack reproducibility?
Yes
It is therefore not science
Angel Russell
>Does it lack falsifiability?
No. See Econometrics and hypothesis testing
>Does it lack reproducibility?
No. Experiments can be re-run. Reproducing a macro system is currently physically impossible, however. Astronomy has the same problem, but that doesn't make it any less scientific.
Austin Smith
>yes it is
What's the scientific method?
Austin Scott
No. For the same reason that law cannot be considered a science, it's all comes down to human influence.
Nolan Kelly
>Does it lack falsifiability?
No, however, old models are not dropped in favor of new ones.
>Does it lack reproducibility?
Yes, economic events tend to be unique and difficult to extrapolate to events in the past.
>Does it make predictions about the future?
Definitely not. Contrary to physics, where, given a set of data, most of them will agree on the general shape and future conclusions. Most economic "experts" disagree on pretty much everything.
Conclusion: >not science
Brody Murphy
Hey, at least it isn't sociology