[conistonwater]

If the analogy with climate science works, then the inequality debate will be even worse than the climate change "debate". The straws on which climate change denialism rests are so small because the level of evidence one can reach with physics is so particularly high. Economics probably won't ever reach the same standard of evidence.

To this day, people in politics are still having arguments about the relationship between inflation and fed interest rates, two of the most easily-observed quantities in the economy. Imagine what the inequality debate will be like in comparison.

[001sky]

Physics and weather forecasting are not similar endeavours. Nor is the relationship with fed interest rates and inflation transparent. FYI "people in politics" describes every economist. their businesss model relies on someone listening to them. Those people pay them money. And those are all "people in politics".

[Ma8ee]

Weather forecasting is applied physics. The systems are big, some interactions aren't known precisely, and the boundary conditions are more complex than most physicists usually work with, but weather forecasting is definitely physics.

[001sky]

Your second sentence makes the first meaningless.

[Ma8ee]

How so?

[ArkyBeagle]

It's apparently all 100% ideological. I have enjoyed reading economics but past some point, when it starts to be policy oriented, the thinking just stops. They pick a team and sing the team song.

The thing about inequality is that it's so shockingly close* to a lognormnal/Pareto distribution that my feeble brain says "biology!" and I stop thinking of it as a problem. It starts to feel to me like when I used to argue with algebra if I don't.

*I cut & pasted some data set from the Internet and the r-squared was way above 0.9

And apparently, if you read enough semantics that aren't really there into history, it looks like the best cure for inequality is to simply stop everything and have World War II again. Cures Depressions, too!

We could not engineer a proper monetary policy, so we sacrificed one in 25 of the world's population instead. And this worked!