Economics: "Humans only value things monetarily."
Sociology: "Uh, I don't..."
Economics: "Humans are always rational and value is calculated by complex internal calculus."
Sociology: "Uhhh, Psy, can you help?" Psychology: "That's not how humans..." Economics: "ALSO MY SYSTEM WILL GROW EXPONENTIALLY FOREVER!!"
Physics: *drops teacup*
(Credit: source unknown)
@space_cadet @aburtch @djsundog
Was gonna say, evergreen content!
@space_cadet @blogdiva I have been thinking for a while that economics *could* actually be a useful area of study IF and ONLY IF it were based on actual observation like actual sciences.
As it is though, economics is more like a long-term right wing push poll.
NO THAT'S A LIE @billclawson @MxSpoon @mivox @space_cadet physics has always been extremely abstract. don't drink the koolaid that numbers are tangible things. this has never been true yet i have lived long enough to know when this propaganda was being pushed across universities in the US: my point of reference was coming in 1986 to NYU from UPR to finish my economics degree. at UPR i studied with a variety of professors trained in EU, BR, MX. here, they were UC wannabes.
🧵
outside of counting fingers and toes, numbers and mathematical equations are just that. they are nothing more than ideas represented with a different semantics.
the neoliberal obsession with "semantics << numbers" comes down to academia's version of a satanic panic with semiology/semiotics and, more pointedly, Derrida's work.
why do you think Bannon latched on to the word "deconstruction" to completely subvert it's meaning & praxis?
🧵
back at UPR had one professor who had graduated at UC and was the expert in microeconomics and GFD it was one of the most awful and most mindnumbingly stupid, completely ahistorical and devoid of actual legal/policy/social context i had to go thru.
maybe it's because i knew how the sausage of economic policy was made back in the day in PRico (thru my dad's work) i found the whole definition of micro/macro a wanker's exercise.
oikonomia means household but also the management of "making house" & living.
philology is what binds all the "big minds" of the 18-19th centuries and, of course, linguistics was one of the first domains attacked by neoliberals, the Kochs in particular, when they decided to reform USA universities from the inside out.
Yves Smith's book was a sigh of relief. i was gaslit out of economics in the 1980s & couldn't articulate why til i read her book
🧵
Smith's book explains why i was in disbelief during Econ classes at NYU. neoliberals have subverted the whole idea of the management of making house and living.
economics wasn't meant to be the study of scarcity.
economics was meant to be the study of how we manage what we have to "make house"; to live comfortably in place.
it's not just about the numbers of making a living. it's literally about how to manage our CONTEXTS of time, people, place. 🧵
BTW if you understand the fundamental dynamics of economics you will then understand why we use the words HUSBAND/WIFE, and even more to the point, ESPOSO/ESPOSA (in Spanish but similar variations in Romance languages) for describing the fundamental social relationship of "making house"; FAMILY/FAMILIA.
Familiae not only comes from farming but means house slave. and you get that meaning in Spanish as esposo/a means handcuffs.
🧵
so the most basic of economic relationships that most fascist neoliberal, Supply Side Jesus followers, wax poetically about is one of literal enslavement: both economic and reproductive. husband is the purveyor of the genetic material that will impregnate the empty vessel of a wife to ensure their properties and wealth "stay in the family".
you can't rend one of the most basic economic relationships only with numbers.
but this is the kind of shit that neoliberals set out to subvert by funding economics departments across the USA and forcing complete rewriting of economics books and curricula with said funding.
go find an Econ 101 book from the 1970s and compare it to something form the late 80s or 90s. it's eyeopening.
economics as management of scarcity is the fundamental LIE neoliberals forced upon the discipline; to fit their dystopian narratives 🧵
because by re-defining life as a scarcity, they can re-write all economic activities as solely useful if they are exploitative, extractive and purely transactional; aka FINANCIAL.
there was a time when FINANCE was subsumed as a branch of ECONOMICS. literally, Reaganomics and the Koch'ing of academia changed that. it flipped things because all what the death of cult of extractive relations wants is the complete financialization of life.
🧵
and just so y'all understand how pervasive their quest has been, CREDIT REPORTS had been banned after abolition in Puerto Rico because they were a tool of slavery for centuries.
Reagan sued to have OUR LAWS against financial servitude rescinded in the early 1980s. soon after credit reports were not only everywhere but normalized.
look up the Technocratic Movement (of which Musk's gdad was a leader) and you'll see why credit reports exist today. 🧵
all this to say, you don't have to be a marxist or a socialist to understand that economics CANNOT be purely about maths. it has to be about CONTEXTS. you cannot dismiss social, legislative, political, financial dynamics when studying the human interactions that are necessary to "keep house comfortably".
economics was never meant to be only about financial extraction. which is why neolibs REJECT Adam Smith's work for their dystopia. /🧵
Any opinions on David Graeber's »Debt - the first 5.000 years«? Seemed like a pretty good starting point to me... 😇
Very glad to hear *that*. Quite a lot of giggling & laughing, especially the bit about that fairy tale, supposedly dysfunctional, but purely fictional sharing economy "regular" economy 101 tends to be founded on. Grimm's fairy tales. Solid base, really. 😂 🤣
Being an anthropologist he knew a bit about *actual* past economies, so at some point he couldn't resist to compare that to what we're told the past might have been like by economists who got it amazingly, but purposefully wrong. It's those bits that are always the most precious with Graeber IMHO.
I guess the only mistake I made was reading Pierre Clastres first, so quite a bit of Graeber seemed a bit boring afterwards, but there still was plenty left to enjoy. Also made it a bit problematic, because I consumed a few books of him in a row, so I can barely tell which book exactly mentioned what with certain topics. Not Graeber's fault, though. 😇
@mivox @space_cadet @blogdiva i remember trying to get a tutor to engage with the idea that one way the labour market works to get rid of unemployment is to starve excess supply to death. He kept saying that the labour market wouldn't ever do that.
He was a nice guy. Smart. But not able to think outside the box he had found to put his mind in.
@mivox @space_cadet @blogdiva 20ish years ago my undergrad had an experimental economics and finance program. Students played games with fake money. These were often simple fake stock markets or businesses with hidden information, e.g. there were 5 products or stocks and each of dozens of students was given info about what one of them would do. At the end of the game, game money was changed for real money, giving students motivation to do well.
I had one of the program profs for a pricing theory course, who points out some assumptions, like no arbitrage, aren't necessarily true, just simplifies or have problems where researchers would use a working theory that violated those assumptions instead of publishing. Also the complex calculus comes from very simple assumptions (e.g Black-Scholes model), a problem familiar to modern physics. Kind of like we normally don't use lagrangian mechanics to play simple games, but someone making a machine play those games would.
@space_cadet https://dothemath.ucsd.edu/2012/04/economist-meets-physicist/
"Exponential Economist Meets Finite Physicist"
@space_cadet Just dropped by to say that
Exponential growth is widely misunderstood. The logistical S-Curve is much more common in closed systems. With 3 distinct phases.
- Exponential growth of low values
- Linear growth as constraints kick in
- Falling growth rate to a peak.
And the 4th phase, which is more likely to be a Seneca cliff collapse due to overshoot, rather than a mirror of the growth side.
And secondly, reality has many more interconnected variables than any models.
@space_cadet This... isn't true though?
Most professional economists - as opposed to ideologues who use economics like a young-earth Creationist uses geology - are well aware of the limitations of monetary measures of value.
For instance, the folk who compile Australia's GDP are keen to remind users that no one stat can tell the whole story, and encourage looking at other measures: https://www.abs.gov.au/ausstats/[email protected]/Lookup/by%20Subject/1301.0~2012~Main%20Features~Defining%20and%20measuring%20GDP~221
(Old link, that specific project has since been discontinued but they're always keen to provide measures other than GDP/monetary.)
There's a ton of economic research and theory that acknowledges and investigates irrational decision-making; see e.g. Kahneman and Tversky's work on loss aversion going back to 1979, which won Kahneman the "Nobel". https://www.bu.edu/eci/files/2019/05/MIC_4e_Ch7.pdf
As a field it certainly has its failings, but it's depressing to see people who'd never trust a politician's representations of evolution or climate research assume that they're describing the state of economic knowledge any more accurately.
…
🏦 Economics: "Also My System Will Grow Exponentially Forever!!"
🧑🔬Oncology/Virology: <hold breath, slowly back out of the room, careful not to touch anything with bare skin>
☣️😷🥸
@space_cadet This is partly why I assert Economics is the religion of our time. We're terrible at detecting religion which is why we keep doing it but imo the best way is to follow a few simple rules -
- Who stands behind the heads of state? (Finance Ministers)
- Who is pushing for their work to be seen as science when it's clearly not. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nobel_Memorial_Prize_in_Economic_Sciences
- Are those people trying to force quasi religious beliefs on people? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Invisible_hand
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trickle-down_economics
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