FRASER – the Federal Reserve’s library – is one of the resources I lean on if I’m looking for metrics about the economy, or just trying to stuff my head with useless knowledge. [fraser] It’s a cousin site to FRED [fred] both from the St Louis Federal Reserve.
Be forewarned: if you go there and just start browsing around, you may lose your day, and wake up in the morning on the bathroom floor, naked, in a pile of data and cryptic text messages sent to yourself from yourself as reminders of things that have already faded from your memory. At least you won’t have to try to remember its name because that’s right in the URL.
It looks like I’m going to be too busy for the rest of my life, but one of these days I want to take advantage of the online courses on economics that they offer. [ed] It’s some great stuff and it covers a wide range of material including 101-style walkthroughs that explain the difference between credit and debit cards and how that can affect your personal finances. At the other end of the range are tutorials on how to use FRED to chart your way through Federal Reserve data on the economy. I used to want to retire to some university and take classes for the rest of my life (now I realize that I’d just be taking up space) and this is a close alternative.
But that’s not what I wanted to tell you about. What I wanted to tell you about is the signs that a sense of humor has been detected among economists. Earlier models of humor established that it was unlikely to appear in that ecosystem, so this is an important discovery:
There is a category of “Dismal Facts” [dis]
It’s not a very large section and, with a bit of luck, it will continue to grow. If you’re interested in things like the growth of the economy following the Civil War, that kind of dismal information is right there for you:
Perhaps that’s not dismal enough. How can stuff that’s so interesting be “dismal”?
I’m not saying anything for sure, but a friend of mine – a trustworthy source – told me this was personally authored by George Soros, who is still trying to make Alexander Hamilton look like a totalitarian douchewhipple: [link]
How to re-establish trust in economics as a science
Speaking of the post-Civil War era; it is good to acquaint oneself with the history of Panics of the Late Nineteenth Century. This is so one can respond when Teh Republicans drone on about how the gubmint should reduce oversight and regulation and let the Free Market work its miracles.
Reginald Selkirk: is economics a science? To what degree is experiment necessary for a science’s credibility?
I’m genuinely curious. One of my friends insists it’s not a science and they blame everything they predict wrong on “market failure”
My answer is no. Lack of experiments isn’t my reason for saying so; after all, there are plenty of other sciences where there are no experiments simply because none are possible in that specific field of research. My reasons for saying “no” are different: science ought to be neutral and impartial. Economics, on the other hand, is simply a tool for pushing various political agendas.
By the way, have you read about scientific communism? A few days ago I got my hands on an old Soviet scientific communism textbook (intended for first course university students). That was a rather hilarious read. Reading that book was no different from reading esotericism. But hey, in the USSR that was considered a science and absolute truth. If economics (as taught in Western universities) was a science, then, by the same criteria, scientific communism ought to be seen as just as scientific.
The problem with economics is that it cannot describe the laws of natural world (like, for example, physics); instead it has to describe an entirely manmade and arbitrary social construct.
One can know the rules of chess, but still be a poor player. Or poker. Or economics.
“In calling Econ “dismal science”, adherents exaggerate–
The “dismal” ‘s fine; it’s “science” where they patently prevaricate.”
— Randal Munroe
How much of economics is a science seems to me to depend more on your definition of “science” than anything economics is. Is Math science? If so, game theory, which is basically pure math, is science. Are psychocology and sociology science? If so, so is behavioural economics.
Describing the whole field of economics as “simply a tool for pushing various politicial agendas” strikes me as way, way off the mark. Yes, some people (mostly non-economists, I think) do use it as such a tool, but lots of science gets (mis-)used in a similar way.
Curt Sampson @#7
Of course, this always happens whenever you formulate some question as “is X a subgroup of Y?” Depending on how you define Y, you can get either an affirmative or a negative anwer.
I’m not crazy enough to try to define “science,” but I do insist on some criteria, impartiality and objectivity being among those.
My own academic degree is in philology. Even though linguistics deals with languages (arbitrary and manmade constructs), I’m still willing to call linguistics a science. By now linguistics has moved away from being prescriptive and has become descriptive instead. Linguists have also finally accepted that no language, dialect, or sociolect is inferior or superior to another one. Modern linguistics at least tries to be objective and impartial.
Since linguistics is my field of expertise, I’m going to use it for an analogy. Let’s imagine that all linguists were native speakers of English language. Even if they studied some other languages besides English, they firmly believed them to be inherently inferior, because since birth each child who would later become a linguist was raised to believe that their native language was superior to all others. When doing research, they already knew the right answer even before conducting an experiment. Thus all the results they got were subject to confirmation bias. An open minded research of any other languages never happened. All linguists also believed that their field had to be prescriptive. It was their white man’s burden to teach English to all those poor souls who were born in other parts of the world and had other native languages. Linguists also firmly believed in using their discoveries for political arguments. Whenever a king made a political decision to abuse some other country, they happily provided arguments about their discoveries as excuses for why this political decision was a good idea. The result was an English-centered science with a priori convictions; a science that was designed for the purpose of serving the political interests of the English-speaking ruling class.
It seems for me like economics has all of these shortcomings. There’s an a priori assumption that a laissez-faire capitalism is the way to go. For some weird reason I rarely see economists seriously examining any alternatives (it’s not like there aren’t any). Then there’s also a bias towards an environmentally unsustainable growth. A significant portion of the economists also seem to have vested personal interests in promoting specific policies. And then there are all those economic arguments which seem hand-tailored to promoting specific political decisions. Let’s look back at the 2008 crisis. Forcing austerity measures upon some countries was a political decision. Yet economists cherry picked arguments for why austerity measures would be beneficial for all those countries that were forced to accept it. Or the eurozone. My country joined the eurozone in 2014. That was a purely political decision. Back in 2013 there were public debates about whether my country should join the eurozone or no. At that time I was a member of my university’s debate club, so I moderated some of these debates. It was fun to watch two people with degrees in economics argue on both sides with cherry picked arguments; it was fun exactly because it was damn clear that we were dealing with a political decision, and all those arguments simply served political purposes. Debates about economics are just so fun to watch. Don’t you see it as a bit suspicious that whenever there are talks about defaulting on some debt, if the creditors are billionaires, all the economists will scream about how this will harm the country’s economy by reducing trust? Yet whenever there are talks about implementing some policies that are bound to cause mass poverty, then most of the economists are perfectly happy and don’t say anything.
I know that every single science can be used to cherry pick excuses for supporting various political agendas. In theory, it should happen like this: multiple impartial and objective scientists make some discovery; afterwards mass media distort it and politicians start cherry picking facts from the press release. In these cases I can accept that there is no problem with the science itself, instead the problem lies with politicians and mass media misinterpreting scientific discoveries. My impression of economics is that it’s not just the fault of politicians and mass media, that economists themselves fail to be impartial. It’s like reading texts written by linguists who lived over a hundred years ago back when linguistics still proclaimed that some languages are inherently superior to others.
I think economics is a science, but it seems to me more like a social science, more akin to psychology and sociology. I know that Marcus and some of the commenters take a dim view of social sciences, especially psychology, but I disagree. Human behavior is often irrational and difficult to predict, so in some ways fields of study dealing with human behavior have an even harder task than those that deal with non-human subjects. It doesn’t surprise me that psychologists and economists get a lot of things wrong, given the complexity of the subjects that they are studying, and the limits on the ability to do controlled experiments, and the limits on what even controlled experiments can tell researchers.
@4 leva Skrebele
Economics, on the other hand, is simply a tool for pushing various political agendas.
All too true, all too often.
The Reinhart & Rogoff “Growth in a Time of Debt” fiasco is a good illustration of this. It tends to be regarded as a spreadsheet fiasco but it is clear that R&R wanted the results they got and did nothing to confirm the results. They just ran with them. Actually, I though the coding scheme was dodgy even before the spreadsheet mess.
I tend to regard current mainstream economics as a pseudo-science, or probably more fairly a proto–science with bits that are scientific. Mainstream economics is often based on poor assumptions and bad theory in many cases. I suspect that there are some bits and pieces of economics that are very valid, powerful and “scientific”.
@ 3 Marcus
To what degree is experiment necessary for a science’s credibility?
To no degree at all. Astronomy and geology are essentially observational sciences. Some sciences are suitable for experimentation; some are not.
it’s not a science and they blame everything they predict wrong on “market failure”
See above. Partly the problem with the “market failure” thingy is that the mainstream economists lack the conceptual tools to do anything else and the only people we hear from is the main-streamers, often of the Chicago School, God help us. It might be interesting to hear a Marxian economist explain the same event. I do not know if they are any better but the analysis will be different
@7 Curt Sampson
Is Math science?
No. It is, I imagine, a branch of logic.
Are psychocology and sociology science?
Yes, psychology is a behavioural science and sociology is a social science. Note, it would be more accurate, probably to say that some parts of psychology are a science. There are some very flakey theoretical areas out there that call themselves psychology. It is too big an area to be dogmatic.
The discipline can range from studying behavioural genetics using mice to optimizing airplane cockpit design. It is a little like engineering. A civil engineer and an EE engineer are different breeds.
Behavioural economics is not much more than cognitive and behavioural psychology in an applied setting (I am exaggerating a bit but not much) so yes it as a science overall I’d say though it may be more of an applied field (behavioural engineering?) than an actual science. I have not been following developments in the field in the last 5–6 years so I cannot say for sure.
@ 9 springa73
Excuse me, we prefer “psychology is a behavioural science”. :)
@ Marcus
If you are interested in some different approaches or viewpoints in modern economics see:
Mazzucato, M. (2013). The entrepreneurial state: debunking public vs. private sector myths. London: Anthem Press.
(Unread, I am just going from some reviews and a quick video of the author lecturing. I shall be proceeding towards the university to pick up the book today.)
Quiggin, J. (2010). Zombie economics: how dead ideas still walk among us. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
Interesting read. John is pretty much a conventional economist but he takes a good stab at debunking a lot of the theoretical drivel that helped cause the Great Recession of 2008.
springa73@#9:
I know that Marcus and some of the commenters take a dim view of social sciences, especially psychology, but I disagree. Human behavior is often irrational and difficult to predict, so in some ways fields of study dealing with human behavior have an even harder task than those that deal with non-human subjects. It doesn’t surprise me that psychologists and economists get a lot of things wrong, given the complexity of the subjects that they are studying, and the limits on the ability to do controlled experiments, and the limits on what even controlled experiments can tell researchers.
That’s a fair defense of the social sciences, however, as you probably expected, I remain skeptical. It’s reasonable to say that the topic is difficult and hard to predict, but predictive power is one of the most important ways that a scientist can claim that they understand a problem. I would argue that our trust for physics is a direct result of the fact that it allows scientists to make predictions that turn out to be accurate, always. I’m not trying to reflexively trash the social sciences, here, but I feel that their greatest weakness is their general inability to establish themselves on solid epistemological grounds – and that seems to me to depend on predictive power. I guess that’s a variation of Kelvin’s dictum on measurement: “to predict is to know.”
jrkrideau@#10:
To no degree at all. Astronomy and geology are essentially observational sciences. Some sciences are suitable for experimentation; some are not
OK, I’ll buy that.
There are some foundational experiments in astronomy and geology, though, which helped establish the field’s credibility. Once astronomers had graduated from being astrologers, they started using their models of the solar system to do things like accurately predict eclipses (and, later, light-bending during the transit of Mercury) – those weren’t stereotypical experiments done by guys in lab coats, but they were nonetheless experiments: there was a theory that led to a prediction and then there was a measurement of an observation that matched the theory’s prediction. Geology had similar situations where observation confirmed theory. My geography/planetology is weak but I believe that theories like continental drift were confirmed using the same theorize/measure/confirm process.
I guess here I am quibbling about the nature of “experiment” – does it have to be a measurement of a situation in which scientists completely control the situation, or can it be observational? I think that it can be. And, if it were otherwise then it would be very hard to claim any kind of experimental basis (i.e.: impossible to be a science) for political science, psychology, economics, and who knows what all else. It’s a problem of how a science establishes an epistemology: we can’t just go around slapping labels on things unless we have some kind of criteria for validating that something is what we say it is, otherwise we’re just running around being apellomancers.