Chinese Economics Thread

Blackstone

Brigadier
In addition, what's the percentage of replicable experiments in Economics? 0%?
Agreed it's very low chance, but never 0%, because it's always possible someone someday might actually come up with one such model. But, I recall one of the first things my Intro to Macroeconomics professor said was Economists are great at explaining past events, but horrible at predicting future ones. That was true decades ago, and it's still true today.
 

plawolf

Lieutenant General
I think you gentlemen are all right and wrong about economics.

It looks like some of your are getting mixed up between methodology and results.

Economics is a social science in that at its core, it studies how people behave.

Economists use many of the same tools and methods to try and develop and test theories as classical scientists.

However, the problem with economics is that the subject of its study - people, is both extremely fluid and also highly adaptable.

Pure sciences study subjects that by and large do not change their behaviour, be it an atom or an animal. That is the core reason why their experiments are repeatable.

Atoms cannot learn from past 'mistakes' of other atoms, but humans can and do. If someone did something and lost a lot of money, they are not going to do the same thing again because if given a do-over, thus economic experiments are hard to reproduce.

On a maco level, by merely studying past human economic behaviour and publishing the results, economists can and do change the behaviour of the population and/or government policy so much that their results become impossible to repeat and valid even, indeed, especially if they were right in the first place.

The best pure science parallel would be with quantum mechanics - that by merely observing something you are also altering its outcome.

That is why economic theories require far more, and bigger leaps of intuition than pure sciences. That is also its greatest vulnerability for abuse, where people with agendas and/or axes to grind insert so much loaded assumptions and biased limitations as to fundamentally determine the outcome irrespective of what actual data you load into the model.

Most of the pundits you see speaking on TV or quoted in mass media are not really serious economists, but rather publicity chasing hacks and/or intellectual prostitutes willing to say just about anything the people writing their cheques want them to.

It's all a giant self-serving circle-jerk designed to serve rich vested interest groups, and most western government economists are little better, chosen only because they say what politicians want to hear (who in turn are in the pockets of super-rich donors).

Please don't mistake those cretins for real economists or the cookie cutter super-rich written and serving mantras, like the evils of 'big government' and the magical powers of the 'market', as real economic fundamentals.
 

kwaigonegin

Colonel
I think you gentlemen are all right and wrong about economics.

It looks like some of your are getting mixed up between methodology and results.

Economics is a social science in that at its core, it studies how people behave.

Economists use many of the same tools and methods to try and develop and test theories as classical scientists.

However, the problem with economics is that the subject of its study - people, is both extremely fluid and also highly adaptable.

Pure sciences study subjects that by and large do not change their behaviour, be it an atom or an animal. That is the core reason why their experiments are repeatable.

Atoms cannot learn from past 'mistakes' of other atoms, but humans can and do. If someone did something and lost a lot of money, they are not going to do the same thing again because if given a do-over, thus economic experiments are hard to reproduce.

On a maco level, by merely studying past human economic behaviour and publishing the results, economists can and do change the behaviour of the population and/or government policy so much that their results become impossible to repeat and valid even, indeed, especially if they were right in the first place.

The best pure science parallel would be with quantum mechanics - that by merely observing something you are also altering its outcome.

That is why economic theories require far more, and bigger leaps of intuition than pure sciences. That is also its greatest vulnerability for abuse, where people with agendas and/or axes to grind insert so much loaded assumptions and biased limitations as to fundamentally determine the outcome irrespective of what actual data you load into the model.

Most of the pundits you see speaking on TV or quoted in mass media are not really serious economists, but rather publicity chasing hacks and/or intellectual prostitutes willing to say just about anything the people writing their cheques want them to.

It's all a giant self-serving circle-jerk designed to serve rich vested interest groups, and most western government economists are little better, chosen only because they say what politicians want to hear (who in turn are in the pockets of super-rich donors).

Please don't mistake those cretins for real economists or the cookie cutter super-rich written and serving mantras, like the evils of 'big government' and the magical powers of the 'market', as real economic fundamentals.

I generally agree with you on principle however I also believe that when it comes to collective human thought, unfortunately we are not too different than the atoms from your example... And perhaps this is also why classical science and theories on economics still work using predictive data. The social construct of human beings have generally been the same forever.

The truth is as much as humans like to 'think' we are unique, adaptable, learn from mistakes etc ... We are not. Almost every if not all global issues you see today be it wars, racism, religious intolerance, power, greed is something that has been repeated countless times over the entire span of human civilization. While technology has changed, our innate behavior hasn't. Our so call moral code of justice will collapse the moment our technology fails us.
 

Yvrch

Junior Member
Registered Member
Personally speaking, whether economics is a pure hard science or not is least of my concerns, as long as one understands what it is for and how to use it. It is for solving highly dynamic extremely complex social, political and economic issues to achieve greater public goods with least possible social, political and economic costs. No other science has even done that to that level, none. So the downside risk is it is also capable of doing great damage if done wrongly, even with good intentions.
Win some , lose some and move on.
 

Yvrch

Junior Member
Registered Member
Well, the portion that deals directly with solid numbers is certainly solid mathematics and not pseudoscience but the overall purpose of economics is to apply the trends generated by those solid numbers to attempt to predict future numbers and that is pseudoscience.

You would better wish it is a science because, like it or not, you live your life according to rules set up by the dictates and reasoning of economics. Sad things of modern life.
 
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