You are vastly downplaying the downsides. Sociology departments and whatever other meme field do influence society. They don’t influence it in random directions. It is consistent in the same bad direction. And they do that using taxpayers money.
Also, moderately bad or biased economy papers also influence society. Even if they don’t, you should want it to be more efficient and remove what is bad for taxpayers’ sake.
Also, why is Acemoglu elevated to the Nobel prize tier while his “inclusive institutions are the best thing ever“ theory is pretty shaky? How is a layman supposed to know what is a good top economist and someone who just looks like one?
"Poor work is read by no one and influences no one" is doing too much work here. Influence follows prestige, and prestigious work can be wrong. Reinhart-Rogoff got cited in budget speeches on two continents before anyone opened the spreadsheet. You can argue about how much it changed policy versus just supplied cover for it, but either way the cost wasn't the salary line.
And by your own arithmetic that's not a small worry. If one good paper is worth billions, then anything that raises the hit rate a few percent, or catches the bad ones earlier, is worth more than the whole cost of the mediocrities you're happy to fund. That seems like a reason to argue about how the system is set up rather than a reason not to
How do you factor in Arday’s role in advising UK education policy in your harm calculation? This could be the most socially harmful aspect of his promotion (apart from inspiring false hope in those associated with non-verbal autistic children).
I agree it's silly to consider academia totally rotten when it's still our best way of producing many kinds of valuable work. Still...
I wouldn't exactly say it's "doing fine." Some departments and some universities are much less rotten than others, true, but that's a little like recommending a restaurant and then saying "most things on the menu won't give you food poisoning." The rotten professors are still embedded in the institutions, they're still wielding a certain amount of power over the faculty and students, still teaching gen ed courses, still influencing the worlds of politics and public education. Still, particularly in the UK, attempting to use state power to stop anyone from telling the truth about all of this.
I'm also concerned about what kinds of good work are being driven out from the more rotten fields. Economics is probably relatively fine, but social science has a much broader purview than merely the economy, and I don't think all of it is unimportant enough to surrender it to the idiots. Wouldn't we all benefit from better access to genuinely high quality research in fields like sociology, instead of having to crawl on our hands and knees through a minefield of disinformation and censorship?
I agree academia is a very mixed bag with some incredible work still being done but this seems to misunderstand the relationship between good and bad work likely because you're most familiar with a field that has maintained a healthy epistemic equilibrium. In others, the proliferation of bad work creates toxic incentives and dynamics that can torpedo the entire enterprise and undermine the process for generating valuable good work in the first place. That's nothing to say about the societal harms of the bad work which have been pretty sever.
The core problem is- the Left *controls* academia. You operate under their consent. Tomorrow they could say "calculus is racist", and what would you do? They are not beholden to truth- only to their social & political power.
This isn't an abstract concern. Consider Cofnas- he's an outsider banished b/c he said true things which ARE NOT ALLOWED. Maybe you are OK with this? Today it's just HBD. Tomorrow its...
Except it's already tomorrow. Talk to Jonathon Anomaly or GeneSmith. Find out how all the major biobanks refuse to share data on IQ (and IQ proxies) with anyone outside the Progressive firewall. They DO NOT CARE ABOUT TRUTH- they care about their ideology, power, and social status.
For all the good papers you cite, the most impactful economist of the past decade is probably Piketty. Everything he's written is almost certainly wrong, either via sloppiness or intent. The problem is Piketty is saying what those in charge want to hear- the truth or falsity of it doesn't matter.
No one says "let's keep Uncle Stalin in charge"- despite Soviet Universities producing good physics work.
As an economist, you should consider the alternatives. The US & Europe spend a combined $8B on economics depts per year. I'm confident if we handed you a budget of $8B, we'd get much better output with much less dross and political nonsense. So why defend the indefensible?
It's really weird to be like "you guys are updating too much on an anecdote" and then list a series of anecdotes which you don't actually know anything about the underlying data and code. How do you know they're not like last fall's MIT guy who just lied about everything and got an R&R in ECMA, and was only caught by a special investigation from MIT (notably, *not* the peer review process that is supposed to catch such things).
R&R is precisely how the system should work! As I understand, they didn’t immediately accept precisely because they needed the data, which he could not provide.
Side note, a really annoying thing here is how I get two contradictory responses which is
1. an R&R is what's supposed to happen and
2. Peer review is not intended to catch fraud
which are mutually inconsistent viewpoints to take. Not saying you hold both but back when I did my substack post on the events there it was an annoying response I got.
2. R&R mostly means you have been accepted pending additional work. It is not "conditional upon getting the data." Even if you haven't submitted the data yet, that happens after acceptance. I know this because I *have* worked on an ECMA paper before.
3. You do not have to submit proprietary code and data to ECMA.
> The costs of bad work are the taxes needed to pay them
You are applying the wrong scoring model to these institutions, one in which these institutions can do no real damage. But academia has inflicted vast, horrific damage on society.
You yourself contemplated the necessity of violence or civil strife due to the Culture War. Academia, along with MSM, is directly responsible for the Culture War. Among other things, academia promotes the blood libel that black social pathologies are primarily (some would say ONLY) due to white racism, a belief that is laughably absurd on the face of it and cannot survive even the most perfunctory examination (e.g. comparing black outcomes in deep Blue regions like California to deep Red locales like Arkansas). This libel, analogous to the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, has a direct causal role in the Culture War and widespread mutual hatred of Americans against their own fellow citizens. Academia should be on the vanguard of ridiculing and condemning this belief as the anti-intellectual and anti-social absurdity it in fact is; instead we have thousands of "professors" doing the exact opposite. However clever the economics papers you cite may be, they cannot possibly make up for the damage the rest of academia has done to our society.
"Something which is of poor quality is read by no one and influences no one"
There seem to be entire (sub?)fields built of lies upon lies, and the epistemic damage is far from trivial. E.g. most education research, which instead of finding out what "really" matters and how much influence we *actually* have over student learning, keeps dragging American education policy in to a tar pit from which none can escape.
Also see, e.g. DAN ARIELY, who I think serves as an important reminder to DENY A LIAR the resources to spread their lies.
> Imagine a black box which, when you pressed a button, would generate a scientific hypothesis. 50% of its hypotheses are false; 50% are true hypotheses as game-changing and elegant as relativity. Even despite the error rate, it’s easy to see this box would quickly surpass space capsules, da Vinci paintings, and printer ink cartridges to become the most valuable object in the world. Scientific progress on demand, and all you have to do is test some stuff to see if it’s true? I don’t want to devalue experimentalists. They do great work. But it’s appropriate that Einstein is more famous than Eddington. If you took away Eddington, someone else would have tested relativity; the bottleneck is in Einsteins. Einstein-in-a-box at the cost of requiring two Eddingtons per insight is a heck of a deal.
>
> What if the box had only a 10% success rate? A 1% success rate? My guess is: still most valuable object in the world. Even an 0.1% success rate seems pretty good, considering (what if we ask the box for cancer cures, then test them all on lab rats and volunteers?) You have to go pretty low before the box stops being great.
Except when it indicates a much deeper rot in particular departments and in the administration (which the Arday situation very much does).
There's lots of other reasoning that follows this pattern: something that by itself is an isolated example but its very presence indicates a deeper systemic issue. This is precisely the argument regarding George Floyd, since the killing of unarmed Black men by police doesn't actually happen that often at all.
It’s the relative decline that matters. The average IQ of graduates is barely above 100. It used to be closer to 120. It is destructive of capital to send people with an IQ of 102 into tertiary education. It also badly harms the R rate, gets swathes of people into pointless debt, and encourages arrested development. Seventy-five per cent or more of courses are utterly pointless, not just adding zero to our sum of civilisational knowledge, but actively destroying it via far-left pish. And then there’s the race communism, with Harvard and other elite institutions bending reality to allow admission solely on the basis of race. Have they ruined these institutions yet? Perhaps not, but they are getting there.
I'm an economist too, and I agree that economics is in good shape, especially, in good shape morally (I do find a lot f journal articles boring). By morally, i mean that economists tolerate disagreement, vigorously criticize each other's work, do not "cancel" people, will hire job canddiates regardless of their political views, punish plagiarism and fraud severely *within the profession*, and so forth.
But I often get the feeling all other departments are corrupt. Anthro, sociology, education, for sure. Can anybody speak to others not being corrupt?
Personally I have found a lot of back patting in the mainstream of the field but the mainstream is very narrow today compared to what it was, and that seems especially compared to pre-marginal revolution. There’s been a number of studies showing how economists often thumb their noses at the other social sciences and are not nearly as interested in inter-disciplinary rigor as the other academic areas are. I personally view that as problematic. https://substack.com/@garthbrazelton/note/p-186423808?r=5bpsw3&utm_medium=ios&utm_source=notes-share-action
Every single one of these articles I’ve seen from an academic explaining why l’affaire Arday is no biggie makes me want to hiss at the academic, “For the love of God, stop talking! The normies can hear you. Do you want the place burned down around your ears?”
“I don’t know anything about the overall lay of the land in higher ed, really, and I won’t even claim to have done any work to inform myself on this. I’ll just mention a few papers that I think are good, and <poof!> my magic spell is accomplished!”
If the standard academic mindset regarding argument, evidence, and proof is at all close to what’s on display here, we are in trouble.
If they “produce no good work,” then what exactly is the point? In my younger years (I suspect you are younger than I) I often defended mainstream economics or tried to justify its irrational rationalities that were apparent even in undergrad. But today it is abundantly clear that the model in which mainstream economics operates today is very much broken and I’d rather focus my efforts in ways that are not so blind spot filled. You might find my most recent article interesting: https://substack.com/@garthbrazelton/note/p-212543455?r=5bpsw3&utm_medium=ios&utm_source=notes-share-action
Shameless plug on my part…if you would like to get a basic understanding of economics (maybe for the purpose of making it easier to identify charlatans?), most of the articles I’ve written are for the purpose of introducing the main ideas of the subject without a bunch of technical jargon or ideological bias.
I’m glad you posted this. Helps me understand your perspective better. “introductory economics divides the stuff we want into goods and services.” That is a core difference in philosophy between what economics used to be (and in my opinion ought to be more like / closer to) and what is manifest in the mainstream and in the classrooms today.
I challenge your readers to ask the following question of themselves:
1. What do you want as a human being?
2. Do you only want “stuff?”
3. Can you only or always find what you deeply want as a human being in today’s various markets?
And the reader can think about where the usefulness of utility and quantification works and doesn’t in their own lives. I urge readers to take at least 10 minutes per question and maybe even discuss with friends. It’s a fun excercise! Works as a solid add-on to your lesson.
"We want goods, services, and less tangible things like friendship and mental stimulation because these things make us happier than we would be without them."
Did you miss this sentence, or simply ignore it because it conflicts with the straw-man version of economics that you're so proud of dunking on?
Again, economics is not about "what you deeply want as a human being" and doesn't claim to address that question, much less assume that the answer to it is found "in today's various markets."
A clumsy attempt to attack credibility by way of loaded questions that misrepresent the point of the article is not "a solid add-on to [the] lesson."
No I just didn’t see real dialog about how the measurable and the more difficult to measure are not treated equally in your broader piece and in typical utility analysis, and I simply quoted your full sentence that appeared before you made that slight qualification later in the piece.
I think the add on lets students think more pluralistically and holistically (and realistically) especially if the rest of their lesson is going to be about utility functions. It was just a suggestion though for your readers who may find it useful to think like human beings and not as an incomplete caricature like homo economicus
Lots of verbiage that might look impressive to a sufficiently ignorant reader...no substance whatsoever. And I address the homo economicus straw man in a later article. At no point do I suggest that people should not "think like human beings" or have a lesson that's just about utility functions. A very clear acknowledgement that people want things other than goods and services is not a "slight qualification" just because your dishonest attack on someone less ideologically blinded and more interested in actual meaning requires you to ignore it.
If you were willing to have an honest discussion, you would have shown some sign of it by now. I'm out.
Yes I agree with that statement generally. But in economics, it’s something that has been a slow burn that really has its genesis 150 years ago during its so called “marginal revolution” when mainstream economics went away from political economy and philosophy toward “marginal quantification.” Academics and practitioners did so because they believed it to be more physics-like… a “real” science. But what they sacrificed was everything else: history, philosophy, human values that cannot be measured readily…. So because it has been a slow morphing, really good people have been indoctrinated. This generally isn’t a case of bad people - its more like a cult or a religion where well intentioned people get taken in over time. Unfortunately this indoctrination infects and impacts most of the world today.
"what [economics] incorrectly assumes is still true about the purpose of growth itself"
Economics makes no assumptions about that. Economics is a systematic way to describe how people and groups allocate resources, not a branch of philosophy that deals with the ultimate purpose of, well, basically anything at all.
"Underneath this sits a very old piece of welfare economics"
Nonsense. There is nothing "underneath" the intellectual humility of recognizing the limits of economics as a field and declining to try to extend it outside those limits.
"The 'look how far we’ve come' argument is Kaldor-Hicks stretched across time instead of across people in a single moment"
Where I've seen that argument (actually a simple invitation to observe reality), it's simply the obvious rebuttal to the despair-porn propaganda currently aimed at young people.
"It ignores the opportunity costs of getting to the supposedly better present"
"it assumes that there is no necessary diminishing marginal returns"
Both assertions made without support, and both completely contrary to what pretty much every first-semester econ student learns.
"true quality of life rather an economist’s false measurement of it"
What is this "false measurement" and where can it be found? Where economics addresses material standard of living, it's ONLY material standard of living. It's not a "false measurement" of something more subjective and holistic, any more than body temperature is a "false measurement" of overall health.
"Beyond the obvious glaring issue that a unit of time is nowhere to be found here"
Most resources, notably labor, are dependent on time.
"we have implicitly agreed to let whatever is countable be a stand-in proxy for everything that truly matters"
No, "we" have not implicitly agreed to that. It's just another straw man.
I'll stop here despite being only halfway through this pretentious, intellectually dishonest diatribe, because quoting highlights (lowlights) from the rest would just be beating a dead horse.
I think you haven’t read your history (of economics) with due respect. Yes today it’s about efficient allocation and “maximizing” and “minimizing” things. But the point of my article is that hasn’t always been the case, and that comes with real costs that economists usually ignore.
I hold no delusion that I can convince those deeply entrenched in mainstream economics of the facts unless they are ready to be open minded. Like I said, a lot of modern Econ is cult like (the very idea of homo economicus suggests this) and one thing we know about cults is that it is nearly impossible to persuade its followers with facts - they have to feel it themselves.
I hope you get to feel it just as I hope much of the modern world truly has the capacity to feel it. These things often follow historical cycles. I see glimmers of hope in the current instability but I hold no breath for mainstream economics itself. The only reason I commented on this post is the poster looks young and the young are not as usually entrenched in the indoctrination. And his posts seem like the kinds of curious things I might have thought about at that age.
"I think you haven’t read your history (of economics) with due respect"
"I hold no delusion that I can convince those deeply entrenched in economics of the facts unless they are ready to be open minded."
"one thing we know about cults is that it is nearly impossible to persuade its followers with facts"
"I hope you get to feel it just as I hope much of the modern world truly has the capacity to feel it."
"entrenched in the indoctrination."
Pretty much what I expected. Can't address someone's objections? Just make a bunch of baseless, derogatory assumptions about them and everything they say is magically wrong without requiring any of that tiresome 'thinking' stuff. Basically the same Get Out Of Reasoning And Facts Free card that flat-earthers use.
If you want the deeper arguments read my articles. You are getting defensive rather than coming to think from a point of actual inquisitiveness so I see no reason to waste time arguing about frivolous things like “who knows more about what economics is.” Best of luck.
You are vastly downplaying the downsides. Sociology departments and whatever other meme field do influence society. They don’t influence it in random directions. It is consistent in the same bad direction. And they do that using taxpayers money.
Also, moderately bad or biased economy papers also influence society. Even if they don’t, you should want it to be more efficient and remove what is bad for taxpayers’ sake.
Also, why is Acemoglu elevated to the Nobel prize tier while his “inclusive institutions are the best thing ever“ theory is pretty shaky? How is a layman supposed to know what is a good top economist and someone who just looks like one?
"Poor work is read by no one and influences no one" is doing too much work here. Influence follows prestige, and prestigious work can be wrong. Reinhart-Rogoff got cited in budget speeches on two continents before anyone opened the spreadsheet. You can argue about how much it changed policy versus just supplied cover for it, but either way the cost wasn't the salary line.
And by your own arithmetic that's not a small worry. If one good paper is worth billions, then anything that raises the hit rate a few percent, or catches the bad ones earlier, is worth more than the whole cost of the mediocrities you're happy to fund. That seems like a reason to argue about how the system is set up rather than a reason not to
How do you factor in Arday’s role in advising UK education policy in your harm calculation? This could be the most socially harmful aspect of his promotion (apart from inspiring false hope in those associated with non-verbal autistic children).
I agree it's silly to consider academia totally rotten when it's still our best way of producing many kinds of valuable work. Still...
I wouldn't exactly say it's "doing fine." Some departments and some universities are much less rotten than others, true, but that's a little like recommending a restaurant and then saying "most things on the menu won't give you food poisoning." The rotten professors are still embedded in the institutions, they're still wielding a certain amount of power over the faculty and students, still teaching gen ed courses, still influencing the worlds of politics and public education. Still, particularly in the UK, attempting to use state power to stop anyone from telling the truth about all of this.
I'm also concerned about what kinds of good work are being driven out from the more rotten fields. Economics is probably relatively fine, but social science has a much broader purview than merely the economy, and I don't think all of it is unimportant enough to surrender it to the idiots. Wouldn't we all benefit from better access to genuinely high quality research in fields like sociology, instead of having to crawl on our hands and knees through a minefield of disinformation and censorship?
I agree academia is a very mixed bag with some incredible work still being done but this seems to misunderstand the relationship between good and bad work likely because you're most familiar with a field that has maintained a healthy epistemic equilibrium. In others, the proliferation of bad work creates toxic incentives and dynamics that can torpedo the entire enterprise and undermine the process for generating valuable good work in the first place. That's nothing to say about the societal harms of the bad work which have been pretty sever.
The core problem is- the Left *controls* academia. You operate under their consent. Tomorrow they could say "calculus is racist", and what would you do? They are not beholden to truth- only to their social & political power.
This isn't an abstract concern. Consider Cofnas- he's an outsider banished b/c he said true things which ARE NOT ALLOWED. Maybe you are OK with this? Today it's just HBD. Tomorrow its...
Except it's already tomorrow. Talk to Jonathon Anomaly or GeneSmith. Find out how all the major biobanks refuse to share data on IQ (and IQ proxies) with anyone outside the Progressive firewall. They DO NOT CARE ABOUT TRUTH- they care about their ideology, power, and social status.
For all the good papers you cite, the most impactful economist of the past decade is probably Piketty. Everything he's written is almost certainly wrong, either via sloppiness or intent. The problem is Piketty is saying what those in charge want to hear- the truth or falsity of it doesn't matter.
No one says "let's keep Uncle Stalin in charge"- despite Soviet Universities producing good physics work.
As an economist, you should consider the alternatives. The US & Europe spend a combined $8B on economics depts per year. I'm confident if we handed you a budget of $8B, we'd get much better output with much less dross and political nonsense. So why defend the indefensible?
It's really weird to be like "you guys are updating too much on an anecdote" and then list a series of anecdotes which you don't actually know anything about the underlying data and code. How do you know they're not like last fall's MIT guy who just lied about everything and got an R&R in ECMA, and was only caught by a special investigation from MIT (notably, *not* the peer review process that is supposed to catch such things).
R&R is precisely how the system should work! As I understand, they didn’t immediately accept precisely because they needed the data, which he could not provide.
Side note, a really annoying thing here is how I get two contradictory responses which is
1. an R&R is what's supposed to happen and
2. Peer review is not intended to catch fraud
which are mutually inconsistent viewpoints to take. Not saying you hold both but back when I did my substack post on the events there it was an annoying response I got.
1. That's not what happened
2. R&R mostly means you have been accepted pending additional work. It is not "conditional upon getting the data." Even if you haven't submitted the data yet, that happens after acceptance. I know this because I *have* worked on an ECMA paper before.
3. You do not have to submit proprietary code and data to ECMA.
Minor details, it was QJE
actually good catch because QJE is even looser on this than ecma
ECMA, ReStud and ReStat in particular tend to have higher data/code standard iirc but even those are basically on the floor
> The costs of bad work are the taxes needed to pay them
You are applying the wrong scoring model to these institutions, one in which these institutions can do no real damage. But academia has inflicted vast, horrific damage on society.
You yourself contemplated the necessity of violence or civil strife due to the Culture War. Academia, along with MSM, is directly responsible for the Culture War. Among other things, academia promotes the blood libel that black social pathologies are primarily (some would say ONLY) due to white racism, a belief that is laughably absurd on the face of it and cannot survive even the most perfunctory examination (e.g. comparing black outcomes in deep Blue regions like California to deep Red locales like Arkansas). This libel, analogous to the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, has a direct causal role in the Culture War and widespread mutual hatred of Americans against their own fellow citizens. Academia should be on the vanguard of ridiculing and condemning this belief as the anti-intellectual and anti-social absurdity it in fact is; instead we have thousands of "professors" doing the exact opposite. However clever the economics papers you cite may be, they cannot possibly make up for the damage the rest of academia has done to our society.
I have to disagree with this:
"Something which is of poor quality is read by no one and influences no one"
There seem to be entire (sub?)fields built of lies upon lies, and the epistemic damage is far from trivial. E.g. most education research, which instead of finding out what "really" matters and how much influence we *actually* have over student learning, keeps dragging American education policy in to a tar pit from which none can escape.
Also see, e.g. DAN ARIELY, who I think serves as an important reminder to DENY A LIAR the resources to spread their lies.
> Imagine a black box which, when you pressed a button, would generate a scientific hypothesis. 50% of its hypotheses are false; 50% are true hypotheses as game-changing and elegant as relativity. Even despite the error rate, it’s easy to see this box would quickly surpass space capsules, da Vinci paintings, and printer ink cartridges to become the most valuable object in the world. Scientific progress on demand, and all you have to do is test some stuff to see if it’s true? I don’t want to devalue experimentalists. They do great work. But it’s appropriate that Einstein is more famous than Eddington. If you took away Eddington, someone else would have tested relativity; the bottleneck is in Einsteins. Einstein-in-a-box at the cost of requiring two Eddingtons per insight is a heck of a deal.
>
> What if the box had only a 10% success rate? A 1% success rate? My guess is: still most valuable object in the world. Even an 0.1% success rate seems pretty good, considering (what if we ask the box for cancer cures, then test them all on lab rats and volunteers?) You have to go pretty low before the box stops being great.
https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/02/26/rule-genius-in-not-out/
"Nothing to see here!" —Lieutenant Frank Drebin
Well, yes. There are millions of people involved with higher education. Some of them being bad is indeed nothing to see.
Except when it indicates a much deeper rot in particular departments and in the administration (which the Arday situation very much does).
There's lots of other reasoning that follows this pattern: something that by itself is an isolated example but its very presence indicates a deeper systemic issue. This is precisely the argument regarding George Floyd, since the killing of unarmed Black men by police doesn't actually happen that often at all.
It’s the relative decline that matters. The average IQ of graduates is barely above 100. It used to be closer to 120. It is destructive of capital to send people with an IQ of 102 into tertiary education. It also badly harms the R rate, gets swathes of people into pointless debt, and encourages arrested development. Seventy-five per cent or more of courses are utterly pointless, not just adding zero to our sum of civilisational knowledge, but actively destroying it via far-left pish. And then there’s the race communism, with Harvard and other elite institutions bending reality to allow admission solely on the basis of race. Have they ruined these institutions yet? Perhaps not, but they are getting there.
I'm an economist too, and I agree that economics is in good shape, especially, in good shape morally (I do find a lot f journal articles boring). By morally, i mean that economists tolerate disagreement, vigorously criticize each other's work, do not "cancel" people, will hire job canddiates regardless of their political views, punish plagiarism and fraud severely *within the profession*, and so forth.
But I often get the feeling all other departments are corrupt. Anthro, sociology, education, for sure. Can anybody speak to others not being corrupt?
Personally I have found a lot of back patting in the mainstream of the field but the mainstream is very narrow today compared to what it was, and that seems especially compared to pre-marginal revolution. There’s been a number of studies showing how economists often thumb their noses at the other social sciences and are not nearly as interested in inter-disciplinary rigor as the other academic areas are. I personally view that as problematic. https://substack.com/@garthbrazelton/note/p-186423808?r=5bpsw3&utm_medium=ios&utm_source=notes-share-action
Every single one of these articles I’ve seen from an academic explaining why l’affaire Arday is no biggie makes me want to hiss at the academic, “For the love of God, stop talking! The normies can hear you. Do you want the place burned down around your ears?”
You should attempt to evaluate other departments...
“I don’t know anything about the overall lay of the land in higher ed, really, and I won’t even claim to have done any work to inform myself on this. I’ll just mention a few papers that I think are good, and <poof!> my magic spell is accomplished!”
If the standard academic mindset regarding argument, evidence, and proof is at all close to what’s on display here, we are in trouble.
If they “produce no good work,” then what exactly is the point? In my younger years (I suspect you are younger than I) I often defended mainstream economics or tried to justify its irrational rationalities that were apparent even in undergrad. But today it is abundantly clear that the model in which mainstream economics operates today is very much broken and I’d rather focus my efforts in ways that are not so blind spot filled. You might find my most recent article interesting: https://substack.com/@garthbrazelton/note/p-212543455?r=5bpsw3&utm_medium=ios&utm_source=notes-share-action
No, I did not find it interesting.
Can’t blame a teacher for trying. All the best.
Shameless plug on my part…if you would like to get a basic understanding of economics (maybe for the purpose of making it easier to identify charlatans?), most of the articles I’ve written are for the purpose of introducing the main ideas of the subject without a bunch of technical jargon or ideological bias.
https://oldmanjon.substack.com/p/utility
Edit: I see from Nicholas's profile that he does not need an introduction to basic economics. If the above came across as condescending, I apologize.
I’m glad you posted this. Helps me understand your perspective better. “introductory economics divides the stuff we want into goods and services.” That is a core difference in philosophy between what economics used to be (and in my opinion ought to be more like / closer to) and what is manifest in the mainstream and in the classrooms today.
I challenge your readers to ask the following question of themselves:
1. What do you want as a human being?
2. Do you only want “stuff?”
3. Can you only or always find what you deeply want as a human being in today’s various markets?
And the reader can think about where the usefulness of utility and quantification works and doesn’t in their own lives. I urge readers to take at least 10 minutes per question and maybe even discuss with friends. It’s a fun excercise! Works as a solid add-on to your lesson.
Sincerely,
The Charlatan
"We want goods, services, and less tangible things like friendship and mental stimulation because these things make us happier than we would be without them."
Did you miss this sentence, or simply ignore it because it conflicts with the straw-man version of economics that you're so proud of dunking on?
Again, economics is not about "what you deeply want as a human being" and doesn't claim to address that question, much less assume that the answer to it is found "in today's various markets."
A clumsy attempt to attack credibility by way of loaded questions that misrepresent the point of the article is not "a solid add-on to [the] lesson."
No I just didn’t see real dialog about how the measurable and the more difficult to measure are not treated equally in your broader piece and in typical utility analysis, and I simply quoted your full sentence that appeared before you made that slight qualification later in the piece.
I think the add on lets students think more pluralistically and holistically (and realistically) especially if the rest of their lesson is going to be about utility functions. It was just a suggestion though for your readers who may find it useful to think like human beings and not as an incomplete caricature like homo economicus
Lots of verbiage that might look impressive to a sufficiently ignorant reader...no substance whatsoever. And I address the homo economicus straw man in a later article. At no point do I suggest that people should not "think like human beings" or have a lesson that's just about utility functions. A very clear acknowledgement that people want things other than goods and services is not a "slight qualification" just because your dishonest attack on someone less ideologically blinded and more interested in actual meaning requires you to ignore it.
If you were willing to have an honest discussion, you would have shown some sign of it by now. I'm out.
Amazing. It’s not just a straw man, it’s an entire crowd of them.
Yes I agree with that statement generally. But in economics, it’s something that has been a slow burn that really has its genesis 150 years ago during its so called “marginal revolution” when mainstream economics went away from political economy and philosophy toward “marginal quantification.” Academics and practitioners did so because they believed it to be more physics-like… a “real” science. But what they sacrificed was everything else: history, philosophy, human values that cannot be measured readily…. So because it has been a slow morphing, really good people have been indoctrinated. This generally isn’t a case of bad people - its more like a cult or a religion where well intentioned people get taken in over time. Unfortunately this indoctrination infects and impacts most of the world today.
That statement is referring to YOUR ARTICLE.
"what [economics] incorrectly assumes is still true about the purpose of growth itself"
Economics makes no assumptions about that. Economics is a systematic way to describe how people and groups allocate resources, not a branch of philosophy that deals with the ultimate purpose of, well, basically anything at all.
"Underneath this sits a very old piece of welfare economics"
Nonsense. There is nothing "underneath" the intellectual humility of recognizing the limits of economics as a field and declining to try to extend it outside those limits.
"The 'look how far we’ve come' argument is Kaldor-Hicks stretched across time instead of across people in a single moment"
Where I've seen that argument (actually a simple invitation to observe reality), it's simply the obvious rebuttal to the despair-porn propaganda currently aimed at young people.
"It ignores the opportunity costs of getting to the supposedly better present"
"it assumes that there is no necessary diminishing marginal returns"
Both assertions made without support, and both completely contrary to what pretty much every first-semester econ student learns.
"true quality of life rather an economist’s false measurement of it"
What is this "false measurement" and where can it be found? Where economics addresses material standard of living, it's ONLY material standard of living. It's not a "false measurement" of something more subjective and holistic, any more than body temperature is a "false measurement" of overall health.
"Beyond the obvious glaring issue that a unit of time is nowhere to be found here"
Most resources, notably labor, are dependent on time.
"we have implicitly agreed to let whatever is countable be a stand-in proxy for everything that truly matters"
No, "we" have not implicitly agreed to that. It's just another straw man.
I'll stop here despite being only halfway through this pretentious, intellectually dishonest diatribe, because quoting highlights (lowlights) from the rest would just be beating a dead horse.
I think you haven’t read your history (of economics) with due respect. Yes today it’s about efficient allocation and “maximizing” and “minimizing” things. But the point of my article is that hasn’t always been the case, and that comes with real costs that economists usually ignore.
I hold no delusion that I can convince those deeply entrenched in mainstream economics of the facts unless they are ready to be open minded. Like I said, a lot of modern Econ is cult like (the very idea of homo economicus suggests this) and one thing we know about cults is that it is nearly impossible to persuade its followers with facts - they have to feel it themselves.
I hope you get to feel it just as I hope much of the modern world truly has the capacity to feel it. These things often follow historical cycles. I see glimmers of hope in the current instability but I hold no breath for mainstream economics itself. The only reason I commented on this post is the poster looks young and the young are not as usually entrenched in the indoctrination. And his posts seem like the kinds of curious things I might have thought about at that age.
I do wish you all the best.
"I think you haven’t read your history (of economics) with due respect"
"I hold no delusion that I can convince those deeply entrenched in economics of the facts unless they are ready to be open minded."
"one thing we know about cults is that it is nearly impossible to persuade its followers with facts"
"I hope you get to feel it just as I hope much of the modern world truly has the capacity to feel it."
"entrenched in the indoctrination."
Pretty much what I expected. Can't address someone's objections? Just make a bunch of baseless, derogatory assumptions about them and everything they say is magically wrong without requiring any of that tiresome 'thinking' stuff. Basically the same Get Out Of Reasoning And Facts Free card that flat-earthers use.
If you want the deeper arguments read my articles. You are getting defensive rather than coming to think from a point of actual inquisitiveness so I see no reason to waste time arguing about frivolous things like “who knows more about what economics is.” Best of luck.