this post was submitted on 19 Jan 2026
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cross-posted from : https://lemmy.zip/post/57305272

Total billionaire wealth in the EU reached €2.4 trillion by late November, exceeding Italy's entire GDP of €2.2 trillion and approaching France's €2.9 trillion economy, a new Oxfam report found.

Archived version: https://archive.is/20260118190308/https://euobserver.com/health-and-society/ara3abf5ee

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[–] namingthingsiseasy@programming.dev 4 points 1 day ago (1 children)

Your post is a succinct summary of the "study" of economics. It's just supporting a conclusion in exchange for taking a bunch of bribes and cherry-picking data to support your argument.

[–] Aceticon@lemmy.dbzer0.com 4 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago)

There's a lot of Economics in Economics.

For example Behavioral Economics actually conducts experiments to determine how people tend to react to various situations (for example, they've actually discovered that at least for some forms of medicine the price when told to the patient can influence how well it works, effectively having a placebo and even a nocebo effect?), so it's pretty similar to Sciences such as Physics or Chemistry.

The rest of Economics, not really, especially the stuff directly and indirectly linked to political decision making (so, Central Bank stuff, Think Tanks, Financial Press, "Economists" in the mainstream Press) - that shit is Politics using Mathematics as a Smoke & Mirrors to make the policy-supporting unsupported and unproven claims look like they're actually the outcome of a rigorous scientific process.

The situation is so hilariously bad that when a guy from Behavioral Economics - Richard Thaler - finally got an Economics "Nobel" Prize (which is not a prize instituted by Alfred Nobel but actually a prize from the Swedish Central Bank "in honor of Alfred Nobel" which they convinced the Nobel Committee to endorse) they didn't give it to him for his edifice of work that disproves that real humans behave as the theoretical homo economicus human model that supports pretty much the entire mathematical edifice for Free Market Theory, but instead they gave it to him for just his work on Nudge Theory which is all about how to influence people in aggregate to do more of what people in power want (so stuff like making the desired behavior - say, "donate organs when you die" - be opt out rather than opt in to get a higher percentage of people with that behavior).

All this to say that whilst most of Economics in the present era is a Shit Show of Politics passing itself as a Science, a little bit of it is actually Science, though that little bit is almost never the stuff the "Economists" in panels in the News or in Central Banks talk about to the public or politicians.