[ianleeclark]

> An issue with these things is that institutions and government make major decisions ... what you get is agenda driven decision making

What do you think politics is? Everyone in politics has an agenda.

> It’s not that we discount them completely but we should also consider opposing data from alternate studies

Politicians already do this. Whenever there's a decision being made, it's being processed through a host of ideological positions.

[mc32]

I’m fine with these if they have some data that’s withstood scrutiny —but I’ve seen governments make decisions based on studies published by second tier educational institutions because it dovetails with their ideology.

[ianleeclark]

I still would like to know what your conception of politics is.

> I’ve seen governments make decisions based on studies published by second tier educational institutions because it dovetails with their ideology.

Do you have an example of this for a humanities specific field? I could see maybe philosophy, but I really don't think most humanities fields have the political power a lot of people attribute to them.

[unishark]

> What do you think politics is? Everyone in politics has an agenda.

Agendas combined with half-truths which is where the bad faith and other problems come in.

[mcguire]

"What do you think politics is?"

How human beings make collective decisions. Why, what do you think it is?

[barry-cotter]

There’s no contradiction between politics being how people make collective decisions and people having an agenda. The differing agendas are part of what make coordination difficult and conflict likely.

Even when goals are the same you can have disagreement over how to achieve them. When goals and values are in conflict, i.e. people have different agendas, we need a mechanism for deciding how to end these conflicts. That mechanism is politics, expressed as some combination of persuasion and violence, how we form, sustain and define communities.

[kortilla]

Agendas are expected. Don’t use an economics paper to back a policy decision under the guise of data/science-driven policy making though.

[ianleeclark]

Economics is a social science, not under the umbrella of humanities. Maybe subfields within economics like economic history could be in the humanities, but most micro and macro would be outside of it.

There are a lot of overlapping fields between the two, but economics isn't in the humanities.

[kortilla]

Huge chunks of economics are just as much garbage as the the rest of humanities because of the lack of experimental capabilities. Any field that has conflicting “schools of thought” is not really founded in evidence and reproducible experiments.

MMT and inflation theories in general are constantly brought up by politicians and they are junk science.

Piketty’s work on inequality is a glorified regression built on an unfounded assumption about the return on capital always outpacing inflation. That work dominates politicians discussing the wealth gaps and is used as “evidence” to tax the wealthy.

Some economics is great (e.g. Nash equilibrium) and is consistently reproducible and observable. That’s not the kind dominating headlines though.