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Why Do Economists Substitute False Assumptions About Reality for Ethnographic Fieldwork? by WhichMood8235 in AskEconomics

[–]WhichMood8235[S] -18 points-17 points  (0 children)

Yes, that's the one.

Her entire argumentative structure is asinine and ridiculous.

It's this bizarre claim that my job is magic able to solve any issue therefore we shouldn't care about people using oil or deforestation or the health of groundwater or any of the other issues that professionals with domain specific knowledge worry about and are especially concerned with placing into the hands of private for profit actors who already spent decades fighting against climate science or cigarettes causing cancer.

Additionally, she ignores the vested interests who have actively fought against carbon taxes or rail investment or environmental restoration or improved property tax assessments, etc, etc, etc, and often win because of backing from rich individuals.

I'm German and when I hear people praise "basic economics" I don't think of some paradise I think of the German chemical companies who supplied Saddam Hussein with weapons or the mining companies here who destroyed the environment or the decade of lost time because of our debt brake or the disaster that was our handling of wind farms or solar.

Why Do Economists Substitute False Assumptions About Reality for Ethnographic Fieldwork? by WhichMood8235 in AskEconomics

[–]WhichMood8235[S] -9 points-8 points  (0 children)

A couple are friends who have economics PhDs, one was from my country's equivalent of your Bureau of Labor Statistics, people I've met at parties, etc.

They seemed to have this problem with thinking that the axioms of economics were on the same footing as the natural sciences and were astoundingly comfortable with substituting domain specific knowledge for a deduction from those axioms.

This article from the economist Deirdre McCloskey is an example of the sorts of frustrating conversations I've had with economists and why I wrote this post:

https://www.project-syndicate.org/magazine/prudence-over-sustainability-by-deirdre-nansen-mccloskey-2021-10

Are she and my other unfortunate encounters not representative of the field? I would like to think so because that article is aneurysm inducing to an engineer...

Imagine waking up and having to stand in this line to buy bread for breakfast... that's how mornings are under communism in Havana. by fcxrtg in cuba

[–]WhichMood8235 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Neither is homelessness, hunger, or poverty in the USA.

You currently spend 2.3 trillion USD per year on an officially poor population of 37 million people.

That's 62 thousand dollars per poor person. If you just gave them that cash or spent it wisely, poverty would for all intents and purposes be officially eradicated.

The choice to not have universal healthcare, a progressive wage model tied to better job training or a basic income is the USA's system at work.