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0 pointsberntb9y ago0 comments

>> I wonder what you would even accept as a "non-ideological source"?

Since no references, which I asked for, have been presented at all, that is not an interesting problem...

>> the grandparent didn't [phrase it strongly] either

Uh, "scientific content in most economists is zero." is not strong?

>> All that said, it's not like the economics profession is an entirely lost cause. There are people like Dean Baker and James Galbraith who manage to occasionally bring alternative voices to the public.

Why do you assume that "alternative voices" are better than the research consensus of a field?

(Yes, I make myself intentionally stupid here. I realize the answer probably is because you like the alternative voices better...? :-) )

>> Since economics is mostly about money, even slightly bending the public's perception on what scientific economic consensus is can have an extreme payoff via influencing public policy.

Certainly you'll find paid research in any field with policy influences. Smoking comes to mind. Please make it likely that most of the [economy] field is corrupt, as the GP argued?

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nhaehnle9y ago· 1 in thread

There was no talk of "idiots and fanatics" in the comment you replied to, hence the "not phrase it so strongly" part.

> Why do you assume that "alternative voices" are better than the research consensus of a field?

It's not an assumption, it's a conclusion from my period of digging into that stuff ;-)

(And it's also not that all alternative voices are always better. It's that there are flaws in the economic research consensus that are clearly visible to an interested outsider who sees the alternative voices and listens to them equally.)

The clearest and most painful example of this is that in the face of close to a decade of extremely clear evidence (in the form of comparing the Eurozone to other advanced economies, mostly), most economists discussing fiscal matters still make no distinction between governments that are monetarily sovereign and those that aren't.

It should be natural to assume that there's likely a qualitative distinction to be made between governments that can go bankrupt and those that cannot - there might be reasons why that isn't so, but then one needs to make an argument.

So you get things like the once famous Reinhart & Rogoff paper about government debt ratios - which has been thoroughly discredited, but even the people doing the discrediting typically didn't point out the problem of ignoring monetary sovereignty.

> Certainly you'll find paid research in any field with policy influences. Smoking comes to mind. Please make it likely that most of the [economy] field is corrupt, as the GP argued?

I assume you would assign the "smoking" issue to the field of medicine. Which percentage of research in medicine would you expect to be closely related to public policy? Which percentage in economics?

berntbOP9y ago

What you write there is interesting, you should have led with that. :-) Could you give me some pointers?

Coming from Sweden, we have a consensus culture. That makes it possible for the media and the politicians to whip up a frenzy and change the acceptable opinions. The point is, you don't have to dig so deep to find official lies. Quite a few of the whistle blowers are economists. I do believe a large subset in the profession have integrity.

>> I assume you would assign the "smoking" issue to the field of medicine. Which percentage of research in medicine would you expect to be closely related to public policy? Which percentage in economics?

Let me put it like this -- Sweden recently got a professor (instated by the government) in the state defence research arm, specialized in gender. He tends to write articles supporting whatever the government likes... :-)

Regarding research -- smoking was not public policy, but purely company interests. All of health questions regarding choices of medicine, treatments and diet are interesting to lots of interest groups. (And age verification of young people was a big thing in Sweden regarding the immigration -- the international research consensus was thrown out...)

The national economy researchers are much fewer. But there are also quite a variation internationally on how politically influenced academics are. Also, what is sensitive in some countries can be researched in others with e.g. a different infrastructure.

In my native Sweden, the health research is probably more interesting to influence than the economic departments at universities. The political parties are interested in the economists. The big corporations don't really care, they talk to the parties directly. (Corporatism, yes..)

>> There was no talk of "idiots and fanatics" in the comment you replied to, hence the "not phrase it so strongly" part.

The statement "scientific content in most economists is zero" needs that the practitioners are either idiots, crooks or fanatics.

But sure, I'll back down here. A group of people studying a subject without any feedback and internal tests can go crazy, obviously. coldtea used the example Freudians. You might use post modernists too -- any group with a common preconceived opinion about how the world works might become a cult.

There is just to much precedent in the crazier part of academia for my argument.

Still, to dismiss an old field of research needs damn good support.

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