Is economics a meme?*

tfw applied math and economics major

It's basically the study of passing money around. How arrogant is that? You're not studying anything that will improve the world. It's the most applied of applied studies.

define meme and define economics

Aren't applied studies more likely to improve the world than theoretical? How does proving the ABC conjecture help the world more than applying economic knowledge to help a developing country?

>not studying anything that will improve this world

Capitalism has brought more people out of poverty than anything else in the world. Economics doesn't just study the "passing of money around" but the exchanges of goods and services. Nations and businesses wouldn't be able to be ran properly without Economics

It depends what kind of economics though, and if you think nations are being run properly. Economics can also give people the tools necessary to fuck people over and fuck up the economy, and they can probably convince people that it's actually the right and moral way of doing things because economics is far beyond the average person and even economists don't understand everything yet.

The only correct economics is austrian economics, the rest is a meme.

Whats wrong with Veeky Forums answers?

or a /pol/ answer for that matter

lots of /pol/tards around who seem to think themselves economics experts

No, it's just people expect it to describe things outside it's remit.

Microeconomics is interesting and useful, macroeconomics (besides inflation) is a meme

Veeky Forums answers are the only correct answers to this.
Everything else is subjective.

Austrian Economics is the only real economics.

You cannot predict markets, and you sure as fuck can't control them, so let them run themselves.

If you still divide economics into schools like this then you definitely don't study it

Mainstream is a meme.

But positivism isn't

Yes
aeon.co/essays/how-economists-rode-maths-to-become-our-era-s-astrologers
>Unlike engineers and chemists, economists cannot point to concrete objects – cell phones, plastic – to justify the high valuation of their discipline. Nor, in the case of financial economics and macroeconomics, can they point to the predictive power of their theories. Hedge funds employ cutting-edge economists who command princely fees, but routinely underperform index funds. Eight years ago, Warren Buffet made a 10-year, $1 million bet that a portfolio of hedge funds would lose to the S&P 500, and it looks like he’s going to collect. In 1998, a fund that boasted two Nobel Laureates as advisors collapsed, nearly causing a global financial crisis.

The failure of the field to predict the 2008 crisis has also been well-documented. In 2003, for example, only five years before the Great Recession, the Nobel Laureate Robert E Lucas Jr told the American Economic Association that ‘macroeconomics […] has succeeded: its central problem of depression prevention has been solved’. Short-term predictions fair little better – in April 2014, for instance, a survey of 67 economists yielded 100 per cent consensus: interest rates would rise over the next six months. Instead, they fell. A lot.

Nonetheless, surveys indicate that economists see their discipline as ‘the most scientific of the social sciences’. What is the basis of this collective faith, shared by universities, presidents and billionaires? Shouldn’t successful and powerful people be the first to spot the exaggerated worth of a discipline, and the least likely to pay for it?

In the hypothetical worlds of rational markets, where much of economic theory is set, perhaps. But real-world history tells a different story, of mathematical models masquerading as science and a public eager to buy them, mistaking elegant equations for empirical accuracy.

Oh I agree that capitalism has been used to take advantage of the less fortunate and poor, but i'm just saying capitalism (i'm in favor of a very regulated free market) has benefitted billions around the world, especially free trade.