DennyNov 24, 2022
Economics: Humans only value things monetarily.
Sociology: Uh, I don't ...
Economics: Humans are always rational and value is calculated by a complex inner calculus.
Sociology: Uh, Psy, can you help?
Psychology: That's not how humans ...
Economics: ALSO MY SYSTEM WILL GROW EXPONENTIALLY FOREVER!!
Physics: *drops teacup*
Show threadJonxe Hart (they/them)Nov 25, 2022

@denny

Everyone: Hey Economics, your assumptions are not just objectively wrong, they are absurd.

Economics: *holding their fingers in their ears* "NA NANANANANNA I DON'T HEAR YOU!!! Free hands! Adam Smith! YOU CANNOT CHANGE OUR MINDS!!! We are a real science!"

Everyone else: *Picard face palm*

Show thread%70%61%75%6CNov 25, 2022
@JonxeHart @denny I find it fascinating how for so many people economics means neoliberal economics. I suppose especially in US universities and probably australian ones, there's not a lot of space for anything else.
Show threadpgcdNov 25, 2022

@muaddib1971 @JonxeHart @denny
Out of curiosity: is there any school of economics that treats reality as something else than a special case we can ignore?
And if there is, are its/theirs predictions actually verifiable and falsifiable?

Honest question, as I have absolutely no knowledge of proper economics outside what trickles down (ahah) from, well, the rest of the world.

Show threadRichard Gadsden

@pgcd @muaddib1971 @JonxeHart @denny

Most of microeconomics operates in the real world, and it makes falsifiable predictions. It's just that its predictions are, well, micro.

It's macroeconomics that gets the discipline a bad name. Even there, there's the school of behavioural economics. But it's hard to generalise from that up to the macroeconomic level (hard as in no-one has done it yet).

Nov 25, 2022 at 10:47amWeb
Show threadRichard GadsdenNov 25, 2022

@pgcd @muaddib1971 @JonxeHart @denny If you know any physics, one way to think about it is like classical dynamics; if you assume zero friction, the maths is easy, but only works in some special cases. If you bring in the full Navier-Stokes equations (for air resistance), then then the maths is impossible (no analytic solutions, you have to use numerical approximations), but the answers work.

Except economics doesn't even have the equivalent of the Navier-Stokes equations.