this post was submitted on 22 Jul 2024
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Economics is STEM???
Economics is science but with resources.
Economics is like ecology for the financial / resource world.
I'm under the impression that it's half math half psychology of groups.
Yeah, part of ecology looks at relationships between groups of organisms, and economics looks at relationships between economic agents. Those relationships require understanding of behaviours and motivations of those groups.
That's a great way to put it. The ecology of money goods and services.
Yes. In the heirarchy of science, it ranks just below literature.
Well, whilst it's basically Astrology, it does decorate itself heavily with Mathematics.
(A more serious answer is: it depends on which part within Economics one is talking about. For example Behavioural Economics does use the Scientific Method).
Econometrics, data science, behavioural economics, game theory, micro and macroeconomics, public policy, all of it uses the scientific method and is empirical.
Could you clarify which part of economics you believe is not scientific?
First, Game Theory is from Mathematics, not Economics.
Next, Policy Making is Politics, not Economics. Sure, many Economists end up working in it, but I wouldn't actually blame Economics for all the Conclusion-Driven Model Crafting that goes on in there - that abuse of Mathematics and modelling to overwhelm and swindle "people who aren't good at maths" is a perversion of even Economics.
As for the rest, the lack of reliability of central bank forecasts of thing such as GDP Growth and Inflation would indicate that whatever they used to base their forecasts on isn't reliable enough for publishing.
As the saying goes, Economists have predicted 8 of the last 2 Recessions.
Back in the day when I worked in Finance and followed those things, it was quite extraordinary just how much of that was flipped around and re-explained when the final numbers came out and things turned out to be very different from earlier forecasts.
More in general a lot, if not most, of Macroeconomics does not seem to be Falsifiable: whenever the mathematical models created based on the various theories in Macroeconomics fail to predict what happens (often by a huge distance) it's invariably blamed on "unexpected factors" - if "unexpected factors" are making your models fail by a huge distance you don't really have a theory that explains reality and are really just practicing what's at best semi-guided guessing, same as how in the old days people predicted the weather for the next day by the color of the sunset and how much the bones of old sailors were hurting.
You could literally apply this nonsensical logic to any other field that uses maths and say "it's mathematics, not X". This is a non-argument.
"Policy Making is Politics", politicians implement policies, but the ones behind the scenes who actually do the math to optimise these policies and advise politicians are economists.
"Conclusion-Driven" this is just plain false. There is an overwhelming amount of empiricism in the economics field.
"Economists have predicted 8 of the last 2 Recessions" .... and have learned from these mistakes. These were described and studied in detail in my course, and you then go on to say that macroeconomics do not seem to be falsifiable. Yes there are no ways to ethically have experiments in economics, but there are plenty of workarounds to not being able to experiment. Natural experiments are rare but they do exist, as well as a myriad of other data science methods to derive conclusions from real life scenarios.
Finally, "when I worked in Finance". Finance is a single field of economics, it does not encompass all there is to learn from economics. There is also a conflation from those who study finance courses that what is taught in economics courses is similar. It isn't. Economics is a STEM field, while finance is a business field.
None of that makes sense.
You're literally not using Logic (for example "we are improving" does not logically follow from "we make mistakes"), arguing against the very opposite of what I said, constructing straw-men from things I did not say so that you tear them down and trying to support your claims on one thing by making unsupported claims on a different thing.
That shit is political speech, not analysis.
Learning from mistakes is an improvement. That you're mad about it doesn't make it any less true. And clearly you don't know what straw-men are given I've quoted you in my reply.
The claim "they learned from their mistakes" does not follow from "they made mistakes" and hence is not supported by it - for example, it's quite common for people to make a mistake and then derive the wrong conclusion for why, hence not learning from it. You're literally ignoring the part I disputed in your original statement (that making mistakes does not always lead to learning from them) and instead addressing something I did not dispute at all (that learning is an improvement) - absolutely, learning is an improvement, shame that "learning from one's mistakes" is a stated desire on how things should be from Pop Culture (i.e. "you should learn from your mistakes"), rather than an observed and confirmed causal relation that's always true.
Again, shit that isn't Logic. You adding a claim of madness for my personality really just drives down the point on that.
As for the straw-man, selective picking of what somebody else wrote (with or without the inclusion of selective quoting) "enriched" by affirmations of your own that go beyond what the other person wrote and are not supported or even implied by it, is literally the most common way to build straw-men.
Having done a degree, yes. It's entirely empirical.
It falls into both Science and Math
Not only that, but it apparently doesn't even involve math anymore!
Hey, if biology qualifies, why not that?