• Isoprenoid@programming.dev
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      4 months ago

      Economics is science but with resources.

      Economics is like ecology for the financial / resource world.

      • Caveman@lemmy.world
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        4 months ago

        I’m under the impression that it’s half math half psychology of groups.

        • Isoprenoid@programming.dev
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          4 months ago

          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.

    • Aceticon@lemmy.world
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      4 months ago

      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).

        • Aceticon@lemmy.world
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          4 months ago

          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.

            • Aceticon@lemmy.world
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              4 months ago

              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.

                • Aceticon@lemmy.world
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                  4 months ago

                  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.

    • Artyom@lemm.ee
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      4 months ago

      Not only that, but it apparently doesn’t even involve math anymore!