[orange_joe]

I think your idea of economics is more informed by online debate than actual research. Contemporary economists mostly try to articulate things through econometrics, which is a fairly data driven field. It’s fair if you have issues with the rigor of these studies but a discussion of schools is fairly off base from my experience.

[thefaux]

My objection is to the idea that everything true and important can be captured in metrics and quantitatively modeled. Then there is the fact that even to the extent that things like macroeconomics can be modeled (which is never at a level of accuracy that would be accepted in any scientific discipline), it still often fails to capture the social/political dynamics of the moment such that the theory matches felt experience. I believe that economics has largely captured power in social science by essentially stealing scientific authority and falsely claiming it as their own. Then they dismiss other fields of social inquiry as soft and unworthy of equal status even though their own insights are often of lesser value than the supposedly soft social sciences.

[peatmoss]

I'm an acolyte in the church of bounded rationality and the fallibility of institutions that practice science.

I studied journalism as an undergraduate, and my beliefs here are like in journalism. Objectivity is impossible, like a Platonic ideal. But, it's an excellent thing to strive for. "Fuck it, it's impossible" is the wrong answer in my opinion.

Qualitative methods and pure theory scholarship have their place, but most useful qualitative research at least hints at some testable hypotheses. I feel that an underemphasis on generalizability is what happens when disciplines give up. And at worse, theory-based scholarship as it's applied in some social sciences is really no better than really obtusely worded political punditry.

[klabb3]

Exact numbers are easy to measure but not the only way to measure something. Data-driven is the new statistics but 10x worse because it has more sources of obfuscation, and bean counters (including super “smart” and analytically minded) obsess narrowly over models. Add ML/AI and you got an order of magnitude again.

There’s an impedance mismatch where we have enormous amounts of useless data and a small amount of useful data. Best we can do is use and create more of the useful data instead of obsessing over P>.99 on something useless that will be misinterpreted anyway.

The problem, in my view, isn’t qualitative per se, but rather unfalsifiability. Ideology is when the solution is always more of the same no matter what the outcome is. Communism/socialism and neoliberalism all fall in this category. I believe this holds true if you go more academic into Keynesianism and say Chicago school - models that have become truisms to their followers.

[reaperducer]

I studied journalism as an undergraduate

Objectivity is impossible

These two statements are at opposition with one another.

I was a journalist for 20 years, and any entry-level reporter can put together a completely objective story. It happens thousands of times a day. Unless you somehow derive bias in stories like "A woman died when her car hit a brick wall on Main Street."

Saying objectivity is not possible is just an internet-age excuse for mental laziness.

[akoboldfrying]

Facts that are included in a story or left out at the journalist's discretion have the power to create very different impressions on people.

For example, in your story, if Main Street is known to house many brothels or abortion clinics, merely mentioning it in the story may have the effect of hardening public opinion towards the victim. If the story were to mention the make and model of the car, and there had been many crashes with that model recently, it might stir up suspicion about that car manufacturer. Almost any detail can be charged in this way.

All good journalists strive to be as objective as possible, part of which means being aware of these kinds of charges, and balancing them against delivering detailed information.

[RavlaAlvar]

How is objectivity possible? Your writing and the reader’s interpretation of it are entirely dependent on individual sensory input and mental models, which are influenced by cultural differences in upbringing and other environmental sociological factors.

The writing inevitably leans towards “objectivity” in your worldview.

[krapp]

>"A woman died when her car hit a brick wall on Main Street."

Except no reporter would write this single sentence as a story.

Please present an example story which is both realistic (could be published or broadcast as is) and also completely objective.

[LargeWu]

Correct. A graduate degree in economics is much closer to an applied math degree than something that resembles what we would traditionally consider social sciences.

[lordnacho]

To me it seemed like there were two kinds of economics degrees.

One was a math degree pretending to be about the economy. At the graduate level, it could be a science: actually going out and measuring things with some pretty hardcore tools, and then publishing a theory that nobody who ought to use it (AKA politicians) would ever be able to understand. There's real findings here on stuff like the minimum wage, which you'd think someone would care about.

It could also be just some extremely complicated derivations that pretended they were related to the real world, but with ridiculously mathematical assumptions.

The other was a softie-softie "talk about how the world works" degree with barely any mathematics, just lots of readings and essays.

You could choose what you wanted to do.

This is why I've never quite figured out how to assess economics graduates. I don't know what they got up to. They also seem to do some very disparate kinds of work once they (I guess I should say "we") graduate.

[xp84]

> You could choose what you wanted to do.

Interesting. Did students choose by selecting different institutions with different ideas of what should go into that degree, or is there very wide flexibility in course requirements?

[lordnacho]

Different courses at the same institution

[littlestymaar]

I see this claim about how people have “a wrong idea of what economics truly is” all the time when someone criticizes economics, but it's a No True Scotsman fallacy. Economics really is like that, and no it's not being “data driven” it's publication-driven with tons of p-hacking in order to either:

1. fit the author's worldview (these people tend to become the famous ones),

2. or simply get one more paper published to survive the publish-or-perish rat race (the average Joe).

[MiguelX413]

My idea of economics is based on people who are interviewed with “economist” written under their name when they're introduced on screen. Whether it be online or by mainstream news outlets, an economist that agreed with what the creator wants to convey is always easily found.

[goatlover]

But that's not the actual science, that's an economist giving opinions on a news show. You can find plenty of examples of physicists giving opinions on lots of things also. Go look on Sabine Hossenfelder's YT channel.

[consteval]

Data driven analytics is more or less useless if you're ideologically driven.

At the end of the day all of our economists are raging capitalists, so they will always approach any data gathered from a capitalist perspective. They will purposefully ignore any other possibilities because they are literally incapable of thinking about them. It's not something they've ever considered or digested.

It's a lot like being car-brained. It's why very smart people keep proposing trains with extra steps but never calling them trains - they can't. Their minds lack the ability to view transportation outside of a car-centric perspective.

Similarly, these economists lack the part of their brain where they can examine economics in a non-capitalist perspective. This is despite the fact that there are zero capitalist countries on Earth. In the US alone, 40% of our GDP comes from government spending. Shh, don't tell the economists!