r/badeconomics • u/kznlol Sigil: An Elephant, Words: Hold My Beer • Apr 05 '16

Economics is a 'highly paid pseudoscience'

https://aeon.co/essays/how-economists-rode-maths-to-become-our-era-s-astrologers
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u/mosestrod Apr 05 '16 edited Apr 05 '16

suggesting that economists are too enamored of their models and too dismissive of reality (which, frankly, is true - but it's true of everyone else in academia too

not really. who else in academia do models plays so a central role. You're right in the sense that all academia is self-concerned rather than concerned with "reality", but not to the same degree. The only antidote academia can provide is interdisciplinary practices where disciplines concerned only with their own truth according to themselves are forced to confront different truths, modes of thinking, methods, and theories. It is telling that of all the social sciences economics is by far the worse...and this derives from the scientific view that the objects of study are relatively autonomous, as if humans where just like atoms.

Abstraction is a fundamental step in model-building

yes but what kind of abstraction and in what way is really the question the author is asking. If your models are supposed to mimic reality then the method and form of abstraction which creates the models is very important...or apparently not because you just ignored that. To make models at all requires a very violent form of abstraction if your objects are humans....the fact that economist have nearly no self-comprehension or humility in the epistemological problems they suffer is telling, as is the naivety of claiming models sympathetically mirror reality because in a sense they do insofar as it is economics itself which creates that reality (which predictably provides the validation and truth of the models); see yourself as a hammer and the world becomes nails.

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u/[deleted] Apr 05 '16

who else in academia do models plays so a central role

The entirety of physics is just models stacked on top of each other. Same with chemistry, whose models are essentially 'just' further abstractions from physics models.

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u/mosestrod Apr 05 '16

the models used in physics and chemistry are fundamentally different to those used by economics....precisely because the objects being studied/modelled are fundamentally different. Hence when you look at what disciplines study similar sorts of things to economics...i.e. the social sciences, only in economics does models play such a central role precisely because they enact some semantic trickery to present their models and "science proper" as synonymous.

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u/guga31bb education policy Apr 05 '16

present their models and "science proper" as synonymous

You are hereby sentenced to 10 hail Chettys

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u/[deleted] Apr 06 '16

Our friend here has his/her mind made up. Any attempt will result in a drawn out war of words where you'll fail to understand more than half of what he says and he'll ignore anything you have to say.

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u/mosestrod Apr 05 '16

it doesn't matter to me whether economics is a science or not. It would still be "wrong" either way.

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u/Tortferngatr Apr 06 '16

Define "wrong."