Economics:

Let's turn this

Into this!

Economics is basically social psychology with some numbers sprinkled in.

Economics, as an intellectual discipline, is closer to theology than physics. Its power is proportional to the belief it commands.

Finance is an arbitrary subset of mathematics, cherry picked to retroactively support a given economic model, and applied as its supporting mythology.

It’s entirely imaginary, which means alternatives are only ever a conjuring away.

Economics is just applied statistics with a little sociology mixed in

Don't forget the other sibling: IT. Theoretical Computer Science is basically a form of mathematics, with all its algorithms and data structures that you can study and do proofs about.

Any "scientific" field that produces Art Laffer is a fraud.

Economics brings the spherical cow issue to its logical extreme with “efficient markets”

Bro, hear me out, what if I buy some of your company, bro, and you buy some of my company, and then we, like, keep buying and selling slices of our own companies back and forth to each other?

Bro we're gonna generate so much economy from this. We're gonna generate trillions in value, bro, just trading back and forth.

... wait... product? What product?

Economics is a funny one as ultimately it's a focused & technical strand of anthropology (which I believe is considered a science by many) that people often incorrectly lump in with maths.

Kinda tough for an academic to run meaningful experiments on an actual economy though beyond models and simulation. And as anyone who has watched a Gary Stevenson video or two will know, your average academic economist is pretty bad at models and simulations.

Though I guess even bad experiments are still experiments

Edit: typo

"Economics is basically math" is one of the greatest PR stunts that anybody ever pulled. Mainstream economics is pseudoscience sprinkled with some maths so people take it more seriously, it has barely any more predictive power than palm reading.

well i seemingly have a very different viewpoint, because the most interesting economics bits are econometrics, essentially data science - the same things all other stem folks use to find the underlying distribution, estimators, their significance, finding the p value. Using this to model whole world is just as wrong as saying all of chem is solved by taking mendelev periodic table. sourely it works, and explains some stuff, but just knowing it does not predict all of chemistry. same way, for example ls-lm model (suppply demand curve) does not explain the whole world, and good economists do not claim they can explain it (sorry for using bad examples, 1 only took 2-3 eco courses).

Economics is just statistics but they ignore half the data that goes into it. It's homeopathic statistics.

I'm so tired of this flack that economics gets, that it is somehow "lesser" because it is a "soft science."

Economics does run randomised control trials. Economics does adhere to testable hypotheses. Economics does use rigorous statistics/maths.

You how sometimes grants/government programs are randomly allocated? Those are live, randomised control trials, and if you read the fine print you'll find a project number for researchers studying the effects of rental subsidies, health insurance, etc, one of which being the Oregon Health Insurance Experiment. Those cancerous recommender algorithms, which are the culmination of millions of live A/B tests? Developed by the Econ PhDs poached by Big tech.

Oregon Medicaid health experiment - Wikipedia - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oregon_Medicaid_health_experiment

It is true that many hypotheses cannot have experiments run. But this makes it even more impressive when economists find natural experiments. For example, the 2021 Nobel Laureates Card, Angrist, and Imbens studied the effects of minimum wage by looking at the towns on the border of New Jersey/New York, which had implemented different minimum wages. They found that increasing minimum wage did not increase unemployment, completely contrary to ahem conservative wisdom.

The Prize in Economic Sciences 2021 - Popular science background - NobelPrize.org - https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/economic-sciences/2021/popular-information/

In contrast, many of the supposed "hard" sciences cannot run experiments either, or also adhere to untestable simplifying assumptions. Ecology, physics, geology (just to name a few) all study systems which are too large and complex to run experiments, yet the general public does not perceive them as "soft".

The difference is that economics is unfortunately one of those fields where lots of unqualified people (read politicians) have lots of strong opinions about, and in turn has a disproportionate influence on everyone. Those criticised austerity measures in the wake of the GFC? That was due to politicians implementing the policies of the infamous "Growth in a Time of Debt" by Reinhart-Rogoff paper, which was published as a "proceeding" and hence not peer reviewed. During the peer review process was found to contain numerous errors including incorrect excel formulas. It didn't matter - policymakers liked the conclusion, and rushed its implementation anyway.

Growth in a Time of Debt - Wikipedia - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Growth_in_a_Time_of_Debt

If you look into any awful policy, you will see a similar pattern. Even Milton Friedman, as an ultra hard libertarian for advocated for lowering taxes and abolishing all government benefit programs, recognised that poor people need some assistance, and so actually advocated for replacing benefits with a universal negative income tax (an even more extreme version of UBI). It didn't matter - policymakers of the Reagan Thatcher era heard the lowering taxes and cutting welfare part, and didn't do the UBI.

ITT: People who have never studied economics incorrectly diagnosing all of its problems

Math is doing the heavy lifting, economics is just borrowing the muscles and hoping no one notices. 😄

Math is for useless things like solving Diophantine equations or playing with primes. I will not have math slandered by associating it with applications.

Economists' math is as good as anyone else'.

The main problem is that economies are incredibly chaotic systems and all the math that humans can actually read described them poorly.