On the whole I see them mainly as marketing for capitalism. It doesn’t mean they can’t describe its dynamics in a coherent way but that analysis is always working towards the same conclusion: that this makes sense and is worth trying to optimize. Certainly their conclusions don’t represent reality in any meaningful way, although I doubt they would even make this claim.
Yes, the consensus is generally correct as it pertains to its actual domain of experience, which is business cycle regulation and the prevention of long-run wealth destruction in advanced economies. We don’t know very well how to turn preindustrial into industrial economies, or industrial economies into postindustrial ones. We don’t know well how to increase long-run growth rates in advanced economies. We don’t well understand problems that would probably be better suited to sociologists if they weren’t all morons, like inequality or birthrates.
Yes, I care about the consensus of people who are actual experts in a field.
Something I realized a while ago is that the amount of subjects where people will actually state that there is a consensus is rather limited and there does seem to be a willingness to test the edges of the consensus on a pretty regular basis. Economics seems to behave that way as well.
I think two of the biggest problems facing economics are the tyranny of the quantifiable, and insufficient public expression of uncertainty.
the former refers to the field’s inability to engage with things you can’t put a value on (eg how many dollars is it worth to drive a species to extinction?). And that’d normally be fine but a lot of economists, especially public facing ones who have things like newspaper columns and popular blogs, refuse to stay in their lane.
The latter can best be understood in comparison to climate science. Climate scientists are constantly pushed by politicians and the media to explain the uncertainty in their work; this is far less often applied to economics despite economies being comparably stochastic.
There are plenty of academic economists out there doing great and useful work, and I’ve had the pleasure to learn from some of them (especially in the agricultural economics field) but they don’t tend to break through into the mainstream consensus that influences policy.
Economics is also a tool that is built on a lot of assumptions
It can be a very helpful and effective tool when you understand it’s limitations and use it appropriately.
One of the biggest issues I find with economic discourse in casual conversation or politics is that most of those things are not respected enough and as a consequence I will often find myself talking to people that are misusing economics, often as a cudgel for their political beliefs or erecting a straw man to take swings at a caricature they have of economists or economics as a whole.
That all said, in that framework this thread is odd. Where consensus in economics firmly exists is for say, the law of demand. But again, all of that is built on a set of assumptions. Where a lot of consensus quickly breaks down is when those assumptions are incorrect in some capacity. For instance it’s not always true that as pirce goes up, qty demanded goes down, for instance Veblen/Giffen goods.
Economics attempts to explain how markets and economic activity work under certain conditions. How those economies should be structured gets into the realm of political and ideological questions, for which there is no real consensus.
While you probably won’t agree with the conclusions or the systems being advocated for in the book, The Capital Order by Clara Mattei offered a perspective that I found incredibly interesting on economic theory. (Edit: To clarify, I misspoke. I’ve only listened to the podcast, and I’ve ordered the book. I meant to make that distinction originally but I was thinking about the book when I wrote this.)
Highly recommend it, but in short her perspective is that mainstream economics isn’t neutral or scientific, but rather a tool used to legitimize and enforce capitalist power structures, especially through austerity.
I took a few economics classes in college, and my opinion of economists went waaaay up. Before I thought it was more like a philosophical debate, but they use massive amount of hard data. The problem is people who have pet policies (like tarrifs or opinions on central banks) need to claim economists are biased because they themselves have no real evidence for their ideas. So they have to assume economists are just pulling things out of their butts because these dogmatic people can’t actually do any research themselves. Personally, I find it liberating to listen to economists because then I don’t have to do mental gymnastics to justify my views.
Another thing is that all the economists I know admit when they are missing information, or that a policy has X effect under the assumption that a bunch of other things are true. Since there are millions of variables that affect the economy, you can never say 100% for sure what will happen. That being said, you can get pretty close in a lot of situations.
Economists are more akin to alchemists than scientists.
This is not a hard science, yet they constantly pretend that it is just because you can do math on money.
There are things they prescribe that work, yet there are many things they prescribe that don’t work, and they are determined that the world functions that way.
Economists also tend to fabricate history, for example, the barter economy that they say existed before currency, which anthropologists say simply did not exist, and common practice was more along the lines of sharing with your neighbors.
But this goes against the articles of capitalistic faith, and so a new history is fabricated instead.
You know who else has to do inscrutable modeling of insanely complex systems?
Climatologists.
And they are telling us that the economists are running our species to extinction.
Not very good considering it tends to be a silo subject in anglosphere countries.
It’d be like taking the opinion of a war college that studiously ignores the existence of every other major power seriously in its plan for world conquest. I’m sure your manual on how to fire an artillery barrage is right, but I think you’re missing the forest for the trees a bit.
In countries where the topic is more firmly wedded to other social science subjects my opinion improves.
> The “economics silo” often refers to the tendency of economists to primarily engage with and cite work within their own discipline, rather than drawing from or contributing to other fields like sociology, political science, or environmental studies.
> a silo mentality can result in missed opportunities, poor decision-making, and a decline in overall performance.
Once you know this a lot of the posters here waffling about how “Economists are experts though so it’s anti-intellectual to view their findings with disdain”.
It really isn’t. They don’t behave like members of the intellectual class, they’re a separate group. If anything, you could say that economics professors tend towards anti-intellectualism given their silo behavior.
It’s like a set of professors continually citing eachother on how to properly balance humors who don’t like to cite other medical professors who aren’t in the field of “Humor Balancing”, because doing so completely derails their own arguments and makes them look ridiculous. But if you point out the stuff they are publishing is rubbish, they’ll cry about you being anti-intellectual, largely banking on equating “I am a professor and I do publishing of my research, therefore I am an intellectual” with “Being an intellectual”.
Go out there and find an economics paper. See if it cites anyone not in the field of economics. If it doesn’t, throw it in the trash. You’ll find that over 99% of them belong in the trash. The remaining 1% wildly disagree with the “Consensus” of economists, as you would expect, given that they’re exposed to the entire world of information outside of the field and this radically alters the evidence available to them, and thus the conclusions they draw based upon that evidence.
(This does not apply in non-english speaking countries in my experience). Indeed, the assumption that fields outside of economics wouldn’t be relevant to economics is why I am comfortable saying economics professors tend towards anti-intellectualism.
“I’m an economics professor.” -> smiles sadly “Ah.”
v
“I’m a professor of political/behavioural/environmental/etc economy” -> “Oh! How interesting.”
Comments
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Do you think economic consensus is generally correct? Represents the best current evidence?
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>Represents the best current evidence?
Yes. Like… almost analytically.
On the whole I see them mainly as marketing for capitalism. It doesn’t mean they can’t describe its dynamics in a coherent way but that analysis is always working towards the same conclusion: that this makes sense and is worth trying to optimize. Certainly their conclusions don’t represent reality in any meaningful way, although I doubt they would even make this claim.
Yes, the consensus is generally correct as it pertains to its actual domain of experience, which is business cycle regulation and the prevention of long-run wealth destruction in advanced economies. We don’t know very well how to turn preindustrial into industrial economies, or industrial economies into postindustrial ones. We don’t know well how to increase long-run growth rates in advanced economies. We don’t well understand problems that would probably be better suited to sociologists if they weren’t all morons, like inequality or birthrates.
Yes, I care about the consensus of people who are actual experts in a field.
Something I realized a while ago is that the amount of subjects where people will actually state that there is a consensus is rather limited and there does seem to be a willingness to test the edges of the consensus on a pretty regular basis. Economics seems to behave that way as well.
I think two of the biggest problems facing economics are the tyranny of the quantifiable, and insufficient public expression of uncertainty.
the former refers to the field’s inability to engage with things you can’t put a value on (eg how many dollars is it worth to drive a species to extinction?). And that’d normally be fine but a lot of economists, especially public facing ones who have things like newspaper columns and popular blogs, refuse to stay in their lane.
The latter can best be understood in comparison to climate science. Climate scientists are constantly pushed by politicians and the media to explain the uncertainty in their work; this is far less often applied to economics despite economies being comparably stochastic.
There are plenty of academic economists out there doing great and useful work, and I’ve had the pleasure to learn from some of them (especially in the agricultural economics field) but they don’t tend to break through into the mainstream consensus that influences policy.
I think economics is more of a soft science than a hard one, but I assume the expert consequences is right more often than random at least.
Undergrad in econ here
Economics is a soft science
Economics is a tool, not a biblical text
Economics is also a tool that is built on a lot of assumptions
It can be a very helpful and effective tool when you understand it’s limitations and use it appropriately.
One of the biggest issues I find with economic discourse in casual conversation or politics is that most of those things are not respected enough and as a consequence I will often find myself talking to people that are misusing economics, often as a cudgel for their political beliefs or erecting a straw man to take swings at a caricature they have of economists or economics as a whole.
That all said, in that framework this thread is odd. Where consensus in economics firmly exists is for say, the law of demand. But again, all of that is built on a set of assumptions. Where a lot of consensus quickly breaks down is when those assumptions are incorrect in some capacity. For instance it’s not always true that as pirce goes up, qty demanded goes down, for instance Veblen/Giffen goods.
Economics attempts to explain how markets and economic activity work under certain conditions. How those economies should be structured gets into the realm of political and ideological questions, for which there is no real consensus.
Yes, I think the consensus of professional economists accurately represents current leading views of economics.
While you probably won’t agree with the conclusions or the systems being advocated for in the book, The Capital Order by Clara Mattei offered a perspective that I found incredibly interesting on economic theory. (Edit: To clarify, I misspoke. I’ve only listened to the podcast, and I’ve ordered the book. I meant to make that distinction originally but I was thinking about the book when I wrote this.)
Highly recommend it, but in short her perspective is that mainstream economics isn’t neutral or scientific, but rather a tool used to legitimize and enforce capitalist power structures, especially through austerity.
Is there really a consensus? Other than on like very high level stuff?
I took a few economics classes in college, and my opinion of economists went waaaay up. Before I thought it was more like a philosophical debate, but they use massive amount of hard data. The problem is people who have pet policies (like tarrifs or opinions on central banks) need to claim economists are biased because they themselves have no real evidence for their ideas. So they have to assume economists are just pulling things out of their butts because these dogmatic people can’t actually do any research themselves. Personally, I find it liberating to listen to economists because then I don’t have to do mental gymnastics to justify my views.
Another thing is that all the economists I know admit when they are missing information, or that a policy has X effect under the assumption that a bunch of other things are true. Since there are millions of variables that affect the economy, you can never say 100% for sure what will happen. That being said, you can get pretty close in a lot of situations.
Economists are more akin to alchemists than scientists.
This is not a hard science, yet they constantly pretend that it is just because you can do math on money.
There are things they prescribe that work, yet there are many things they prescribe that don’t work, and they are determined that the world functions that way.
Economists also tend to fabricate history, for example, the barter economy that they say existed before currency, which anthropologists say simply did not exist, and common practice was more along the lines of sharing with your neighbors.
But this goes against the articles of capitalistic faith, and so a new history is fabricated instead.
You know who else has to do inscrutable modeling of insanely complex systems?
Climatologists.
And they are telling us that the economists are running our species to extinction.
Generally yes I trust economists’ view the economy more than any other group of people.
Not very good considering it tends to be a silo subject in anglosphere countries.
It’d be like taking the opinion of a war college that studiously ignores the existence of every other major power seriously in its plan for world conquest. I’m sure your manual on how to fire an artillery barrage is right, but I think you’re missing the forest for the trees a bit.
In countries where the topic is more firmly wedded to other social science subjects my opinion improves.
> The “economics silo” often refers to the tendency of economists to primarily engage with and cite work within their own discipline, rather than drawing from or contributing to other fields like sociology, political science, or environmental studies.
> a silo mentality can result in missed opportunities, poor decision-making, and a decline in overall performance.
Once you know this a lot of the posters here waffling about how “Economists are experts though so it’s anti-intellectual to view their findings with disdain”.
It really isn’t. They don’t behave like members of the intellectual class, they’re a separate group. If anything, you could say that economics professors tend towards anti-intellectualism given their silo behavior.
It’s like a set of professors continually citing eachother on how to properly balance humors who don’t like to cite other medical professors who aren’t in the field of “Humor Balancing”, because doing so completely derails their own arguments and makes them look ridiculous. But if you point out the stuff they are publishing is rubbish, they’ll cry about you being anti-intellectual, largely banking on equating “I am a professor and I do publishing of my research, therefore I am an intellectual” with “Being an intellectual”.
Go out there and find an economics paper. See if it cites anyone not in the field of economics. If it doesn’t, throw it in the trash. You’ll find that over 99% of them belong in the trash. The remaining 1% wildly disagree with the “Consensus” of economists, as you would expect, given that they’re exposed to the entire world of information outside of the field and this radically alters the evidence available to them, and thus the conclusions they draw based upon that evidence.
(This does not apply in non-english speaking countries in my experience). Indeed, the assumption that fields outside of economics wouldn’t be relevant to economics is why I am comfortable saying economics professors tend towards anti-intellectualism.
“I’m an economics professor.” -> smiles sadly “Ah.”
v
“I’m a professor of political/behavioural/environmental/etc economy” -> “Oh! How interesting.”
Do I think that Experts In Their Field, know what they’re talking about?
….. Yes. Why…. wouldn’t I?
Do I think they are never wrong? No, and that’s not the same thing.
Also, LOTS of economists are not university professors. There’s lots of demand in the private sector for people that understand economics…