This is an issue with any pop-X book, namely that complicated, messy topics are oversimplified and packaged neatly.
As a reader, it is very enticing - you feel like you are learning very efficiently, the reviews are filled with comments like 'I learned more from this book than 5 years of geography/economics/history/physics/chemistry etc in school'. People that have swallowed the pop-X book wholesale become evangelists, telling everyone who will listen how important it is to 'Sleep for 8.5 hours a night', or 'Stop eating bread'. But really, you are often paying to be told a fairytale about topic X.
/r/BadEconomics is a fun subreddit; it's people with at least some passing acquaintance with formal economics writing snarky takedowns of economic claims made elsewhere on Reddit (or the Internet at large). It's not quite as good, content-wise, as the tier-1 subreddits like AskHistorians, but it's a solid tier 2.
Most of the /r/badX subreddits are like that. Especially the ones that require people to post why something is bad, which is all of them that I'm aware of except /r/badphilosophy, which just makes fun of the posts (and is fun in its own peculiar way).
Sure they would. There are plenty of "Einstein was wrong" or "The circle really can be squared" cranks out in the general public. The main difference is that in economics there often is a financial reason why people hold weird ideas rather than just being crazy.
>There are plenty of "Einstein was wrong" or "The circle really can be squared" cranks out in the general public.
Yes, but those are kooks, where the consensus between physicists is specific and solid and their predictions either pan out or not (except in wild areas of exploration, like string theory and such).
Whereas with economics, economists don't see eye to eye (except on trivial parts that are 99% mathematical results), and anything applied with the intention of making a prediction is rarely better than random guesses.
Simply one discipline concerns a fixed reality, where preferences and opinions don't matter as to the behavior of e.g. matter, energy, etc. and we try to model it as best as we can (a fixed target).
And the other a human activity, where political biases, private interests, personality quirks, morality, cultural norms, backroom deals, laws, outlaws, the press, and everything in between pull in various directions, and where even if we could get close to an accurate predictive model, there would still be huge (trillion dollar huge) motives (political, financial, career related, etc) to make black appear as white and vice versa.
To put in blunt terms, the difference is between science and social science.
In economics the outcomes are always modeled with one or few input variables: something went up/down because something else went up/down etc reality is rarely so trivial or well understood. Add that with the ability to impact geopolitics you get schools of thought and cult like following.
Nobody outside of theoretical physics cares about rivalry between string theory and loop quantum gravity perhaps not many within. However lot of people care about their economic schools of thought and it standing in academia/public discourse, as many regulatory/ political decisions are made (justified at-least) with some economic/sociological theory or other.
Pop-econ, as a subgenre of pop-science, is a necessary evil.
The thing about econ is it's closely connected to political philosophy, and politics causes all sorts of partisan issues. Witness the furore over Piketty's work over recent years.
So why do I say it's necessary and evil?
Well it's necessary because it's often the only way for someone outside of academia to get an overview of a topic. Without these kinds of work we'd be lost rifling through various journal papers, not knowing which ones are considered important and which ones not.
It's evil because that editorial power is seductive. To sell books, that author needs to make a forceful point. To do that, you can't just leave the evidence at "inconclusive", even though that might be sensible. Why write a book at all if it says "we don't know"? So we get selection bias in what books are written.
A friend of mine writes pop-econ books, and from a very libertarian point of view. Something about it seems like a just-so story. The inherent noisiness of economic evidence is lost, all the graphs are cherry picked to support his view. And yet you'd have to dig quite a lot to find specific things to complain about.
I studied economics myself, and on a lot of things I thought the stack of papers had good arguments one way and the other. My tutor, a famous Marxist, was also quite good at giving the free market side of evidence, so it's not like he was all one-sided.
My main concern is that people who haven't had a bit of exposure to economics at university think that it's like picking up A Brief History of Time. Basically true, but for laymen (wonder what a real physicist would think, heh). In actuality a lot of it is opinion, disguised as science. (In fact I tend to view a lot of economics like that; Opinions well defended by some sort of evidence.)
> Why write a book at all if it says "we don't know"?
Related to this, someone commented on the /r/AskHistorians discussions linked by the article [1]:
> What I like about history is that it teaches you humility. Even if you spend years researching a small topic, there will be so much that you don't and never will know. Political science is the opposite with lots of helicopter opinioning. New crisis in Mali? Here I come with my insta-factoids and world explanations
The fact is that around these parts of the world (Eastern Europe - The Balkans) people have started wars and a lot more people have died as a result of those wars, only because one hundred years ago some historian just couldn’t say “we just don’t know” after dedicating all of his career to a specific topic (like “who was the first one between populations A, B and C to have occupied this land?”). In the meantime historians have smarten up a little, it’s not all black and white, there are a lot of “maybes”, of “we need more data to answer that question” or even “this question will probably never be answered in a satisfactory matter”.
Meanwhile, I’m pretty sure people are dying at this very moment because, like you said, some political scientist or economist just couldn’t say “we don’t know” or even “it’s complicated”.
“Public policymaking” treats a lot of the present political science and economic discourse as, well, established and tested science, hence all the troubles I mentioned. The same thing used to happen to history, there were a lot of past political decisions taken only because an historian had written a good book or two about a specific subject, but fortunately for historians that train has passed. That partially happened thanks to people like Popper writing about the “Poverty of historicism” and about how we shouldn’t treat history like a “hard science” and especially how we shouldn’t take important policy decisiond based on what history says or doesn’t say, I feel that economics and public political science also need their Popper moment.
"Something about it seems like a just-so story. The inherent noisiness of economic evidence is lost, all the graphs are cherry picked to support his view. And yet you'd have to dig quite a lot to find specific things to complain about."
Perhaps your friend could do a really popular debunking book called 'Stop trying to manage noise' and make a fortune? I'm actually a bit serious, so many people do not understand the idea of sampling error and associated noise in data.
Yeah that's a classic. But it takes a lot of effort to pick apart those kinds of things. Some of the logic is very subtle and gets lost if you're also in a partisan debate.
Two unstated premises here: 1) You can't share quantitative methods in a pop science book. You can't share with a general audience ideas like multiple regression, covariance, controlling for confounding factors. 2) There is no compelling evidence to back up many economic empirical results other than multiple regression. Some intro stats professors and some Kaggle competitors would balk at those assumptions.
I thought Ha-Joon Chang’s books on economics were excellent, because they provided a fresh perspective, and most economic principles are not that hard to understand anyway, it’s just a highly ideological “science”.
Even Michael Hudson’s books which are full of the jargon of the trade, are accessible because he explains the nomenclature.
As a reader, it is very enticing - you feel like you are learning very efficiently, the reviews are filled with comments like 'I learned more from this book than 5 years of geography/economics/history/physics/chemistry etc in school'. People that have swallowed the pop-X book wholesale become evangelists, telling everyone who will listen how important it is to 'Sleep for 8.5 hours a night', or 'Stop eating bread'. But really, you are often paying to be told a fairytale about topic X.