The fact that the economics profession can offer so little in the way of consensus guidance about dramatic, crucially important events like the panic of 2007-2008 is a huge problem and a very legitimate knock on the enterprise, but it doesn’t actually undermine the overall epistemic status of the discipline.Now you have to ask yourself: if the complete and total failure of a discipline to produce anything resembling a believable and empirically verifiable description of the very things the discipline purports to study does not "actually undermine the overall epistimic status of the discipline," then what would? This shit really is a religion; it literally cannot be disproven; it transcends all mortal truth categories and exists in ethereal unity with the whole cosmos; it is the worldspirit moving over the dark waters; yea, verily, it is the ein sof, the unutterable other beyond even the crowning keter of the tree of life, the attributeless everythingness without form or substance, the unspeakable, infinite actuality of the name of god.
-Woody
In fact, the "overall epistimic status" of economics is that it's bunk and bullshit to begin with, so actually, when I think about it, I find myself in rare agreement with Yglesias. The fact that this crackpot pseudoscience once again fails doesn't alter its fake and fraudulent nature one motherfucking bit.
31 comments:
Hallelujah!
That 'experimental economics' is a brand-new discipline does not tell you quite all you need to know about the remainder of the field -- but it's a damn good start.
It's very cool how the Woodchuck has become sort of the symbol of the whole passive-agressive dork/wonk/DC/college-boy/wormboy/media class. Very cool because he's indeed the most perfect distillation of it -- the hangdog-ness, the repulsive physical appearance, the barely sublimated self-hatred and aggressive, the profound careerist mediocrity, the wicked mainstream liberal politics, just the complete fucking smeggy, corrupt evil to a tee.
Someone should do woodchuck shirts, like alligator shirts, and sell them at Urban Outfitters in Columbia Heights in DC, or whatever neighborhood that sort of filth tends to congregate in. Make a killing.
I take it that geologists will soon come in for the same criticism in the wake of their failure to predict the Japanese earthquake.
Oink-eeee-nomics is what My Last Name Means CHURCHES, Dammit! actually is practicing. I've got a mind to send him a 55 gal drum of ranch dressing.
Aw, he's just trying to help troop leader DeLong feel good about himself. It's kinda cute, really.
-- sglover
I do like the phrase "liquidity trap." It's like an even politer euphemism than "water sports."
A brief Moldbug quote is in order here:
Most people believe that there is something called "economics." But this is just not so.
When we use the word "economics," we are conflating two completely distinct disciplines. Worse, at most one of these disciplines is right - each despises and condemns the other. It's as if English had one word stellatry, which meant both astronomy and astrology.
Our first discipline is literary economics. Literary economics is what the word economics meant in English until the 1870s or so. It is Carlyle's dismal science. It was also practiced in the 20th century, under the name Austrian economics, by figures such as Mises, Rothbard and Hazlitt. Our second is quantitative economics. Quantitative economics was invented in the late 19th century and early 20th century, by figures such as Walras, Marshall, Fisher, Keynes and Friedman. It is also practiced today, under the name economics.
Observe, for a moment, the suspicious evolution of this terminology. Astrology and astronomy have a similar temporal relationship - as do alchemy and chemistry. Ie: astronomy replaced astrology, and made it clear that its predecessor was nonsense. Chemistry replaced alchemy, and made it clear that its predecessor was nonsense.
But when Robert Boyle replaced alchemy with chemistry, he chose a new name to make it clear that he was separating the sheep from the goats and classifying himself among the former. Astronomy is separate from astrology for much the same reason, and in much the same way.
Whereas in economics it's the other way around. The new name has replaced the old one in situ, forcing its predecessor to decamp to a label which, like all labels, was originally pejorative. It's as if chemistry had decided that it was the only true alchemy, and forced the original alchemists to rebrand their field as, I don't know, Swedish alchemy.
Of course, this doesn't prove anything at all. But isn't it slightly weird? You'd think that if you discover that Field A, which has been taught in all the best schools and universities since Jesus was a little boy, was so misguided in its methodology that it is useless to continue its work, and instead people should study the far superior Field B, you'd call your glorious new B a B, rather than insisting that you had discovered the one true A.
http://unqualified-reservations.blogspot.com/2008/08/de-gustibus-non-computandum-or.html
A brief Moldbug quote is in order here:
I was going to give you a hard time, but yeah, for what's-his-face that is brief.
Economics is and has always been a branch of ethics. Political arithmetick isn't any less political because it's quantified. Everybody knows "intangibles" can't really be computed, the fact that they don't say this openly is historically because cost-benefit analyses were used by bureaucrats as a rationalization for state enterprises like the TVA to fend off outside review. Technocracy is a sham.
Tyler Cowen has his head stuck up his ass.
As a buddy of mine once told me:
Economics, predicting the past with increasing accuracy.
money is fake. why shouldn't the way people think about it be fake too?
Yinz aren't getting all kabbalistic 'n shit, are you, monsieur?
And if Wiggles wants his thesaural eructation taken seriously, perhaps he could grant us lumpen a glimpse of what this "overall epistemic status" is that is not actually being undermined. What a load of dog squat.
Something to remember next time I visit Wal*Mart.
An informative filmed discussion of philosophy of science, with an appended audio clip about epistemic status, is made available at
http://www2.lse.ac.uk/newsAndMedia/videoAndAudio/research/scienceAndPhilosophyOfScience.aspx
"In the second clip, he explains ways in which philosophers of science help to evaluate the epistemic status of a theory or claim – that is, what is the value of a particular knowledge claim, what sort of evidence is there and is that good evidence?"
The speaker is Dr Roman Frigg, a former theoretical physicist who is now senior lecturer in the Department of Philosophy, Logic and Scientific Method at the London School of Economics.
Nonny 2:01
LOL. Someone simply isn't using the proper seer stones.
if you believe financial crises in any shape or form undermine economics then you are an idiot.
They are only even a minor slight against ratex (which can incorporate them with minor modifications.)
Sorry your precious marx failed to carry the day. That is what this is really about.
Yo Zoz - remember when you usedta put down psychology at Slate by calling it a branch of advertising?
Ya gotta think up something equally as slick for economics.
I'm thinkin' maybe an extended riff playin off Aristotle's idea that the polis mirrors the family, which if true, would mean that ya start with "Home Economics" and build yer edifice from there.
Anyone wanna help me save the world by sewin some shop aprons ?
Mrs. Schoonmaker showed us guys how to do it in 6th grade ...
Ratex? Lulz. I wasn't gonna drag Miss Cleo into this.
It's very cool how the Woodchuck has become sort of the symbol of the whole passive-agressive dork/wonk/DC/college-boy/wormboy/media class.
This is exactly why people who complain about IOZ focusing too much on Yglesias are missing the point. The blogosphere is a machine for creating and enforcing elite consensus; arguing with one of them means arguing with something much bigger.
nonny @ 8:54
I rationally saw that one coming....and pre-responded @ 2:01 above.
Nice try though. You're away.
--the real Donny
Amen
I take it that geologists will soon come in for the same criticism in the wake of their failure to predict the Japanese earthquake.
Geology may not be able to predict the exact date of future earthquakes, but (a) it does a damn fine job of explaining them, and (b) it certainly predicts that such things will happen, and where. It just can't tell you exactly when.
IOZ, have you even cracked a book by Mises?
Deductive logic is bullshit?
To be fair to economics for a moment, the greatest clusterkerfuffles often happen when some random schmoe, central bank chairman or pet Senator declares that they have found some magic loophole through the normal rules of economics that will make everyone rich forever. 'Economics' in that sense, although influential and discussed by credentialed people, is scientific in exactly the same way that the cranks who bombard researchers with perpetual motion ideas are practicing physics.
I would hardly argue that economics can only be failed. For the most part the paint hasn't yet dried on the notions of falsifiable hypotheses and empiricism in that field. Nonetheless I would argue that we would be marginally better off if policymakers were not as perfectly ignorant of actual economics (even to the point of a working knowledge of their own heroes, like Friedman) as they are of biology and the climate.
Anon 4:52 PM
They were Austrians, Dude?
IOZ, have you even cracked a book by Mises?
The guy was a crackpot. If you share his passion for the gold standard, well then, you are a crackpot too. The Economist, in a review of one of his tomes summed it up succinctly (see wikki):
"Professor von Mises has a splendid analytical mind and an admirable passion for liberty; but as a student of human nature he is worse than null and as a debater he is of Hyde Park standard."
To be fair to economics for a moment, the greatest clusterkerfuffles often happen when some random schmoe, central bank chairman or pet Senator declares that they have found some magic loophole through the normal rules of economics that will make everyone rich forever.
Have you been paying attention? Recent clusterfucks have occurred when elites listened completely to the wisdom of establishment economics and organized society to conform to it.
Feh. Economics has several denotative meanings and ten million connotative ones. I suppose we might as well discuss angels and pinheads unless we define our terms first.
Insofar as 'economics' consists of a rough consensus among quantitative academics about best management practices for capitalist economies, I think that the ideas of deregulating banks and killing oversight (electrolytes:Brawndo! ::innovation:financial deregulation), cutting taxes during a surplus and slashing the budget during a recession all run counter. The first encourages speculative bubbles and the latter make recessions more likely and more painful, respectively.
On the other hand, those policies do make some subset of people phenomenally rich. Setting aside that 'success' was an artifact of collective hysteria, the wealthy and successful always bring along a gaggle of credentialed remoras to cook up whatever Dow 36,000!!! baloney it takes to get patted on the head by their betters.
I recognize that the idea of 'consensus' is kind of silly idea when we talk about economics, but I think that those basic points cover the spectrum from Friedman through most liberal economists of the academic sort. The problem is that economics is always counterintuitive because the things that it recommends never seem like the most appealing thing to do at the time. When you're running in the black it is hard to save money that you could spend. When you're in the red it seems crazy to spend more. Who is going to tell Enron or Lehman to step on the brakes when they're generating double digit growth year after year after year? Maybe they did find some magical formula to beat the business cycle!
Because economics prescribes the least appealing option in almost any circumstance, it is easy enough to dismiss when times are fat. Eventually people feel guilty when times go pear shaped, but clearly not guilty enough. To be fair even the guilt thing could be wishful thinking when scapegoats are always so easy to find.
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