/sci/ - Science & Math

[Anonymous No.3133450]

>Economics class
>Teaching Keynesian and Monetarism primarily
>Both theories proven time and time again not to work and totally 100% useless at predicting the direction of the Economy.
>The entire class is pretty much based around ultra-pro capitalism (Moneytheism) propaganda.
>Wonder why this class even exists and how people could take it seriously when it is only equivalent are those stupid TV psychics and every time I hear economists speak, they pretty much use the same cold-reading techniques as TV psychics.
>MFW the entire time during every lecture.

[Anonymous No.3133454]

The gears of the world are lubricated with bullshit.

[Anonymous No.3133453]

>>3133450
>proven it doesn't work
>the american economy is still functioning
derp

[Anonymous No.3133460]

And ESPN has entire shows where people sit around and predict sports results based on previous performance and are wrong all the time yet people still watch. Welcome to the real world OP, where what you know doesn't matter but what other people think you know matters.

[SAGEGOESINALLFIELDS No.3133464]

>Wonder why this class even exists and how people could take it seriously when it is only equivalent are those stupid TV psychics and every time I hear economists speak, they pretty much use the same cold-reading techniques as TV psychics.
>and how people could take it seriously when it is only equivalent are those stupid TV psychics
>when it is only equivalent are those stupid

>My face when

[Anonymous No.3133467]

>>3133450
>Both theories proven time and time again not to work and totally 100% useless at predicting the direction of the Economy.

Except you are completely wrong.

>He thinks that a gold based laissez faire economy is not only feasible at large scales but also isn't subject to insane wealth inequalities, monopolies, violent market movement and worse for everyone but a handful of people.

[Anonymous No.3133475]

Free market principles don't work with government intervention.

And every time a bank or financial institution goes bust because of bad lending practices, they should only thank themselves. You can thank the feds for the housing bubble.

[Anonymous No.3133479]

How is this science?

[Anonymous No.3133484]

>>3133479
It's a social science. Deal with it.

[Anonymous No.3133489]

>>3133484
How is that a science?

[Anonymous No.3133498]

>Except you are completely wrong.

Explain the past 50 years of the British economy then, when under both pure Keynsian and pure Monetarism policies both unemployment and inflation both rose at the same time too unimaginable levels, something that is essentially impossible under both models.

[Anonymous No.3133499]

>>3133467
>Implying he isn't.

Sure was those brilliant economists that led the deregulation and that amazing idea to do absolute jack shit about credit default swaps and packaged mortgages.

There was like five economists who could predict how shitty this all was, one was Raguram Rhajan who directly presented that shit to a few top economics advisors who rejected it.

The rest of the field was hurr durring and talking about how great shit was going.

[Anonymous No.3133503]

Protip: Keynesian Ec works.

Protip: OP is an idiot.

[Anonymous No.3133506]

>>3133479
>>3133489
Think of it like science but in different universes with different laws of physics each and every time.

Economics has very simple and basic "laws" like supply and demand curve.

Beyond that, the models are hurr durr and are often proven wrong all too often.

[Anonymous No.3133507]

>>3133506
How is this science?

[Anonymous No.3133510]

>>3133503

Define "work"

[Anonymous No.3133515]

>>3133489
It's math.

Bad, unpredictable math.. but math.

Humans are unpredictable, it's why Russia's glorious plan and essentially every planned economy fails in the fuck ass.

[Anonymous No.3133517]

>>3133515
>implying math is science
How is this science?

[Anonymous No.3133520]

>>3133507
Pseudo science is science to, yah know.

I can't stand economists who feel they are the intellectual equal of actual scientists, like the nobel prizes in economics for example, just because they can do math for a retarded field.

[Anonymous No.3133526]

>>3133520
How is it science?

[Anonymous No.3133527]

>>3133515
Back in the 1940s and 1950s and till the 70s, the Soviet model was hailed as the perfect economic model that will save the world, having been more efficient and superior to capitalism at that time.

Gee, what happened?

[Anonymous No.3133528]

>>3133498
>>3133499

lolwut?


Deregulation and extensive privatization with minimal protectionist policies aren't Keynesian, and in both cases these are what lead to these situations. That and the defanging of the financial regulators in both countries.

[Anonymous No.3133530]

>>3133527

They got crushed by the free markets.

[Anonymous No.3133540]

>>3133530
A free market that delayed puberty for 40 years, eventually was "free" for a few weeks and became a protectionist, militarist keynesian package known as Reaganomics?

[Anonymous No.3133541]

>many of the economists involved in the ill fated attempts to manage the economy arriving at the same conclusion their predecessors had 30 years before: they could only prevent an economic disaster not engineer growth. Other economists point out that other county’s success had more to do with focusing on improving their education systems and industrial bases rather than large scale attempts to engineer the entire nation’s economy. Another economist worries that the whole Monetarist project might have simply been an attempt to reduce the economic and political power of the working class by raising unemployment and lowering wages, as he puts it "creating a Reserve army of labor.

Corruption + Arrogance + Ignorance + Alot of media presence = more money for rich people while everyone else is fucked over.

Economics: Fucking over everyone else for your own gain and then convincing them that you are doing good.

That's what I would name Economics class if I was dean at a university.

[Anonymous No.3133545]

How is this science, exactly?

[Anonymous No.3133556]

The consensus in the economics literature is that the Keynesian multiplier is somewhere between 1 and 1.4. Whether that means you believe expansionary countercyclical fiscal policy is a good thing is up to you. Most economists support moderate fiscal stimulus in recessions above and beyond what the automatic stabilizers like welfare provide.

With respect to housing, there have been financial bubbles and crashes in both non-liquid asset and deposit markets long before the existence of central banks or fiscal authorities. It is therefore difficult to conclude that bubbles are the Fed's fault, but that doesn't mean the Fed doesn't affect the size of any given bubble. There is zero consensus among professional economists on the extent to which the Fed supported the housing market before this recession.

[Anonymous No.3133566]

Classical > Keynesian > New Classical > New Keynesian

I think that's pretty widely agreed (well, at least here in Finland).

Your courses sound very bad. I hope at least that you're not majoring in eco and getting that shit.

[Anonymous No.3133567]

>>3133545
It is science, it just gets a bad rap because people think that they can hold educated opinions without studying the subject. If someone tries to bullshit theorems on Lie algebras, they get found out quickly and laughed at. For some reason, when someone holds court and spews bullshit on rationality or the business cycle, people will argue with them seriously.

[Anonymous No.3133572]

>>3133567
HOW is it a science? HOW?

[Anonymous No.3133575]

Op thinks the theories are followed to the letter
>mfw

[Anonymous No.3133581]

>>3133572
Formulate hypotheses, test them against data. Revise theories on new data or the proposal of additional hypotheses that better fit the data. Repeat.

[Anonymous No.3133586]

>>3133567
>herp derp

[Anonymous No.3133588]

>>3133545
cause they use math and stuff.

[Anonymous No.3133592]

>>3133581
And how does this apply to economics, exactly?

[Anonymous No.3133596]

>>3133588
>implying mathematics is a science

[Anonymous No.3133606]

>>3133592
Because that's what most of the economics literature is. Data-driven work trying to explain what we observe.

[Anonymous No.3133610]

>MFW talking to Economics students and they believe that Infinite growth is possible and that Climate Change and Overpopulation will never be a major issue and the only thing stopping utopia on earth is that damn meddling Government thing representing the people.

[Anonymous No.3133615]

>>3133606
>trying
>trying
>trying
>trying
>trying
>trying
>trying
>trying
>trying
>trying
>trying
>trying
>trying
>trying
>trying
>trying
>trying
>trying

How is it a science?

[Anonymous No.3133616]

>>3133581
10 >formulate hypotheses on historical data
20 >ignore interaction between hypotheses and reality
30 >profit from the bubble
goto 10

[Anonymous No.3133621]

>>3133606
...and never caring that this is all post-hoc rationalization, and demonstrations of predictive power are never seen as necessary for a theory to be taken seriously.

[Anonymous No.3133624]

>>3133615
What's your definition of a science, then?

[Anonymous No.3133625]

>>3133610
Where do you live?

[Anonymous No.3133634]

> 1 = 1
>Why?
>Because we say it does and there is no way to prove this just like philosophically one can never truly prove they are not a brain in a jar or how science can never conclusively prove something to be immutable fact and if this explanation does not satisfy you then tough titties, you'll just go through life thinking you're really deep while never making any actual progress and knowing in your heart that it wasn't bravery that caused you to ask why but rather your fear of finding your limitations and that they are lower then you dreamed.
>...
>...
>So you can't prove 1=1?
>No Bobby, you cannot prove that 1 =1 without being tautological. Are there any other questions?

[Anonymous No.3133643]

>>3133621
We make predictions all the time. We make predictions about the volatility of asset prices or how taxes affect investment. But we can't tell you what the unemployment rate will be a year from now any more than the weather can be predicted in a month in advance because both are dependent on future random shocks.

[Anonymous No.3133653]

>>3133643
and your predictions are useless because they interact with the matter you are predicting. They're a strange quantum form of self-fulling prophecy, and everyone except economists arn't clued in.

[Anonymous No.3133665]

>>3133653
The profession realized this problem in the 1970s. That's why we introduced rational expectations into macroeconomics, to fix just that.

[Anonymous No.3133666]

>people asking why economics is an arts class

This literally pisses me off more than I can describe. It's like people assume that needing a calculator makes something a science.

[Anonymous No.3133667]

>>3133653
That is the most retarded statement I've heard in a while.

You do know one can calculate one's effect on a system you're interacting with right?

Not to mention the myth of the rational investor is just that: a myth.

[Anonymous No.3133676]

>>3133667
Really? So what you're doing is at best, psychology or sociology, which everyone on /sci/ knows is not science.

[Anonymous No.3133677]

>>3133667
>Not to mention the myth of the rational investor is just that: a myth.
The scientific economist, too.

[Anonymous No.3133690]

OP, you're an idiot.
That's all I'm going to bother saying.

[Anonymous No.3133687]

>>3133665
So uh, which famous economist won the nobel prize for solving the turing machine halting problem?

[Anonymous No.3133695]

>>3133653
>and your predictions are useless because they interact with the matter you are predicting. They're a strange quantum form of self-fulling prophecy, and everyone except economists arn't clued in.

If you think the predictions are a self fulfilling prophecy, that means they end up being accurate...

Maybe you could complain about economists missing other possible outcomes that don't occur due to their predictions being self-fulfilling but being able to correctly predict outcomes is hardly "useless" as you claim.

[Anonymous No.3133708]

>>3133653
Bitches don't know about my feedback theory.

[Anonymous No.3133709]

>>3133695
So if I tell you, you're going to die today, then I go kill you, who will award me a nobel peace prize?

[Anonymous No.3133717]

>>3133708
Ok, so how does one devise an economic theory that is immutable regardless of feedback? Wouldn't that be science?

[Anonymous No.3133733]

>highly technological society
>surprised when totally useless fields pop up to keep people working

[Anonymous No.3133749]

Well, you see OP, when a large number of individually unpredictable entities interact where they can't be observed, it is only natural to assume that they collectively behave in ways that can be modeled with a few straightforward equations.

This is, of course, entirely correct, which is why economics is a science.

[Anonymous No.3133757]

>>3133749
Except you're only describing historical reality, see:
>>3133170

for a discussion on coincidence and predictive power.

[Anonymous No.3133770]

>>3133717
This would be called an invariant. Go read "Risk and Asset Allocation" by Attilio Meucci. Then compare that with Emmy Noether theory of conservation laws and invariance of coordinate systems. If you can compare them mathematically, then you'll deserve a nice double Nobel prize.

[Anonymous No.3133776]

>>3133770
Stop bashing Obama and Gore! I'm sick of this!

[Anonymous No.3133788]

>>3133709
You don't know what a self-fulfilling prophecy is. Here's Wikipedia:

>A self-fulfilling prophecy is a prediction that directly or indirectly causes itself to become true, by the very terms of the prophecy itself, due to positive feedback between belief and behavior

If I could kill people by making a prediction that they'd die, which causes them to commit suicide because they believed my prediction, you better believe that would be worth a Nobel Prize.

[Anonymous No.3133795]

>>3133770
Yes, and there are no invariants in economies of scale that exist soley on fiat currency.

[Anonymous No.3133801]

>>3133788
You are neglecting the role of the state, which listens to you and executes the prophesied one for the pre-crime of self-murder.

[Anonymous No.3133806]

>>3133788
Eh, perhaps you should go read the original self fullfilling prophecy comment and realize you're an idiot from the response.

[Anonymous No.3133822]

Don't think Keynes was predicting so much as prescribing, broheim. Simply stated, government stimulus during cyclical downturns evens out the rough spots. Then the stimulus is withdrawn during the upturn of the cycle. Not sure where your beef lies.

Oh, and economics != sci

[Anonymous No.3133846]

>>3133770
>This would be called an invariant.

Uh, no. Invariant has nothing to do with predictions affecting the outcome of an experiment. Invariant just means it doesn't change when you change the reference frame or coordinate system (or some other transformation). Your post is a non sequitur.

[Anonymous No.3133894]

>>3133806
>I am dumb and I misunderstood what self fulfilling prophecy meant
It's been fun talking with you too ^_^

>>3133801
>You are neglecting the role of the state, which listens to you and executes the prophesied one for the pre-crime of self-murder.

Let's use a more concrete example. Economists make predictions about employment (and GDP etc) in the private sector. Do you think the government (of every developed country) is in a conspiracy to pressure private business to make these numbers accurate? Or maybe you think the government affects private business by such means as lowering interest rates or issuing bonds. Of course, in order to do so, the government's economic theory (which they got from economists) about how interest rates or bonds affect employment has to be correct.