To further my goal of gaining 10 kabillion Substack subscribers and getting elected President of Earth, I recently posted a summary of EIAS to /r/badeconomics. This appears to have worked and built on the burst of growth from a restack of part 2. To the 46 new subscribers who’ve joined in the past week: welcome!
An inevitable part of posting to /r/badeconomics is an onslaught of criticism and a busy couple of days responding to all of it. Let’s take a look, starting with the weakest criticism because I want to have fun.
Weak criticism
A lot of people just turned their brains off and didn’t engage with the post at all. I got reactions like this:
You are wrong in paragraph 1. Science isn’t anything to do with “empiricism”, science is “falsificationism”. Take a philosophy course and stop wasting everyone's time
I responded with this:
Falsificationism is an empirical view of science. And I looked at multiple approaches to science because there are more than one—note the usage of “almost any.” [I had said “the foundation of almost any view of science is empiricism”.]
There are some philosophers of science who are more agnostic about the usage of real-world evidence, in particular Paul Feyerabend, but the most popular view today is scientific realism, which is implicitly empirical. I only know all of this because I read Godfrey-Smith’s Theory and Reality while writing the series. And yes, I’ve taken a philosophy course.
If I had written this today, I would have started by saying that there is obviously no single view of what counts as science, and falsificationism lost popularity among philosophers of science in, like, the 1970s. It’s very hard to take some of these people seriously without giving in to my urge to call them stupid directly.
Some comments I didn’t even consider worth responding to:
economic models suck, they don’t represent the real world, and teach bad lessons, any “science” based on them is junk
A pretty key part of my argument is that modern economics does represent the real world for reasons x, y, and z in the post, so if you’re not going to engage with that reasoning at all, I don’t think you’re going to care when I restate it a thousand times.
Cope harder. Bro had to write a long-ass wall text just to make a point 🤣 Who cares whether it is a science or not
The very first paragraph explains why you should care: scientific status suggests empirical status, meaning calling economics non-scientific makes it seem like economists don’t check their views against real-world evidence at all. Later in the post, I point out how this view can be used as a Trojan horse for nonsensical policies.
it's hilarious that anyone still cares what economists say in the macro sense. They hage no models that can make correct predictions. Just look at the past 6 months once again they were all wrong.
Here’s my “response”, which is in the post, so I didn’t bother replying with it:
Criticizing economists for failing to predict the 2008 crisis is practically a category error, too, like criticizing public health experts for failing to reliably predict earthquakes. Economic forecasting really does tend to be overconfident, but that doesn’t imply the whole field has failed. The primary business of academic economists, if they can even be said to have one, is identifying causal effects of public policies, not predicting macroeconomic indicators like the unemployment rate.
This actually got a better response in a separate comment:
It might be a science, but it doesn’t have great predictive power. To me, having lots of math is fine, but the quality of a model is defined by its ability to make accurate predictions. And macroeconomics especially is just not good enough at that. It should be able to predict indicators like GDP growth, inflation rates and the potential impact of different policies. Just declaring that to be outside of the scope doesn’t cut it for me. Until then, I consider it more of a protoscience.
Whether macroeconomic forecasting is what we should consider to be “real economics” is pretty much subjective, but in any case, it’s still true that most economists spend little time on it. I’d show you a survey indicating this if I could, but you just need to be involved with the field to know. I did find this ranking of the top institutions in the field of forecasting, which looks very different from the ranking of top economics institutions in general from the same source.
I was dared into reposting my work in /r/badphilosophy, creating one of the most controversial posts that subreddit has seen recently. It currently stands at 47% upvoted, 53% downvoted. Some replies:
We need to bring back bullying in a big way! And we should start with econ majors!
The Babylonians kept track of the price of barley and sesame oil for hundreds of years and they didn't discover anything. Maybe they found out that having warlords in charge made the prices surge.
Economics has numbers and formulae, and thus is clearly a science. Economists could make people less confused by wearing white coats and goggles and maybe you could put some money in a beaker and stare at it?
If religion and maths had a disabled child, it would be economics.
I’m not reading all that, but economics truly is not science.
How could people interested in philosophy suddenly stop caring about engaging with the actual argument and revert to knee-jerk dunk reactions? The answer probably has something to do with philosophers preferring socialism to capitalism at a ratio of about 1.8 to 1, and their younger students more so. This wouldn’t be so bad if they knew economists aren’t all supercapitalists who think the system can do no wrong, but unfortunately, very few people in that subreddit wanted to read any of the many surveys of economists I linked.
Here’s a final reply from the /r/badeconomics crowd that I ignored, before we move on:
Holy shit man. Get professional psychiatric help.
yeah
Strong criticism
Beginning with the criticism that received the most attention:
[Here at the start they’re quoting me.]
>I seriously mean what I’m saying. Some argue that whether the field is scientific doesn’t matter, but I can’t disagree more; the foundation of almost any view of science is empiricism, so claiming that economics isn’t a science is tantamount to claiming that it has little connection to reality at all. You can only say this with willful ignorance of the work economists do.
This is a logical error. Just because scientific fields are empirical doesn't mean non-scientific fields are not empirical. Science can have other defining traits beyond just an empirical approach. In fact, I think there is clearly more to it than that. Gathering the complete works of an ancient author and publishing them is “empirical,” but it is not scientific. The exact demarcating principle for science--and if one even exists--is debated by philosophers (and historians).I'm not suggesting that economics is not a science, just that your caricature of all nonscientific fields as “non-empirical” is silly.
I responded to this with the following, which was not well-received:
These are good points, but I don’t really mean that anyway. My primary message in this area is that characterizing economics as non-scientific suggests that it isn't empirical, which is very misleading. I might update things later for clarity.
I still stand by this statement. I agree that non-scientific fields can have empirical evidence, and I agree that the exact demarcating principle isn’t obvious (which should’ve been clear in the post?) I also think that claiming economics isn’t a science is misleading for the reason I gave. Here’s the response I got for the last quote:
No, it suggests that it lacks other critical epistemic features of scientific rigor. Things can be both empirical and wrong. Things can be both non-empirical and right.
The claim that it suggests that is fundamentally wrong. You are displaying scientism, and it’s a problem in many of the social sciences.
Economics does have a tenuous relationship with scientific principle DESPITE being empirical, because empiricism is not sufficient.
I never claimed empiricism is sufficient for something to be scientific, and I was clear that there are other problems that make it hard to claim economics is a science. That’s why I said this in the post:
If the weak points of economics are too much for you and your definition of science is too strict to classify it that way, it’s still misleading and harmful to describe economics as unscientific.
Frankly, I think they’re being way too charitable about how people will interpret a statement like “Economics isn’t a science”. The average person is not going to hear that and think anything like “Hm, economics may lack critical epistemic features of scientific rigor, including but not limited to empirical content. I should be somewhat less confident in the things economists say than the things physicists say, while still giving careful attention to their ideas.”
Instead, they’re going to think of astrologers and flat-earthers, whose critical errors are not caring about whether their predictions work or what the Earth looks like from space, respectively. The stressful feeling economics and other areas of expertise can produce—“Oh no, could I be seriously wrong?”—gives way to a nice feeling of relief: “Ah, but economics isn’t a science. I don’t have to worry.”
From over in /r/badphilosophy:
I almost feel bad for stockbros having to come to terms with economics being a social-science.
Not that I think there’s anything wrong with the social sciences. However, they're clearly the type that thinks there is and it's causing them some serious dukkha. Ironically, the social sciences could help them with that.
“How do I hedge against existential dread?”
This just isn’t what I’m saying. The response I gave:
Maybe you’re not targeting my argument here, but the point isn’t that economics is on equal footing with physics or chemistry. I’m completely fine with economics being a social science.
One good bit of reading I agree with is John T. Roberts' argument in Contemporary Debates in Philosophy of Science. Here’s the conclusion:
> Prediction and explanation require reliable sources of information about the world, in the form of strict or statistical regularities. Laws of nature are regularities that have certain features: they are global or universal, and robust, in the sense that they do not depend on contingent details of particular systems of objects, and they would not be upset by changes in the actual circumstances that are physically possible. In order to have explanatory and predictive value, though, a regularity (strict or statistical) need not have these special features. Hence, not only does social science have no laws; it needs no laws.
There are a lot of nice features other sciences have that economics doesn’t. I’m fine with economics being a social science; I’m not fine with arguments that dismiss it as unscientific to avoid engaging with the ideas in the field.
Elsewhere in the replies I received this, which didn’t receive the attention it deserved:
[…] I don’t feel like you are steelmanning the actual argument. The point isn’t that economists are all blind zealous ideologues.
Rather, it is that economics is a very value laden field, because it concerns itself explicitly with the question of what major policy decisions and economic systems are desirable.
That doesn’t mean that doing economics rigorously and objectively is completely impossible, but obviously it does mean that ideological influences will be a much bigger challenge in this field compared to something like biochemistry.
And since the academic world relies on external funding from governments and the private sector, it is not difficuly to imagine how these actors can put direct or indirect pressure on the academic world to promote certain theories and ideas over others. And those ideas will tend to be the ones that don’t question the capitalist class and the liberal status quo too much.
You may argue that economists are very rigorous when testing their hypotheses, but what I described already becomes an issue at a much earlier stage of research. At what philosophers of science call the “hypothesis generation” stage. What ideas will even be thought of (let alone tested) is influenced very strongly by the cultural and economic pressures working on the researchers. It is far from purely objective.
You got me. There are strong theoretical reasons to suspect foul play in economics that don’t exist in other fields, and any reasonable account of whether the field is scientific should at least mention this. But this is still not a good idea, as I point out in my reply:
I think I did a better job of steelmanning the alternative case in the larger series, and conceded a lot of important points when it was advisable to.
I agree that there's much more reason to suspect ideological interference in economics, which is why I provided substantial evidence that this hasn't happened to a degree that makes the field useless or unscientific. Economists just don't promulgate pro-capitalist ideas as much as you’re suggesting. I strongly recommend looking at the survey data linked in the post; here’s another paper I didn't link in the original post. One useful highlight is that 65% agreed when asked if the income distribution in the US is too unequal, with 14.2% disagreeing. That doesn’t sound very pro-capitalist, and is at least not suggested by a statement like “Economists are generally pro-capitalist.”
But most of the things economists are asked to make judgments about don’t fall neatly into pro-capitalist or anti-capitalist buckets anyway. I don’t see how that works with a proposal in that survey like “Climate change poses a major risk to the US economy”, where 71.7% agreed.
This next reply wasn’t popular even in /r/badphilosophy, but it’s worth mentioning:
Assuming people are rational actors with free will is a similarly bad take and bad philosophy, too. Any economic empiricism that ignores irrationality is myopic.
The response I gave:
Usually rationality is not truly assumed. It’s used to model behavior as a way of saying “The way people behave in reality is something like this,” which makes sense given what we observe. Businesses really do weigh costs and benefits when, for example, laying off the youngest workers first rather than the more experienced ones. I’m sure they discuss this openly. “We could keep paying this guy, but we're really short on cash and the cost is too high...”
Irrational behavior is very well-known to economists. One of the Nobels went to Daniel Kahneman for his work on this. Rationality is only a fitting generalization; we don’t believe utility functions literally exist.
Lastly: Economists absolutely do not assume free will. I don’t even see why that would be relevant except as an interesting aside when discussing it.
Producing these responses was exhausting and repetitive. But I learned two things:
I probably should have mentioned some additional problems with my view that the replies pointed out, like how value-laden the field is. I also should’ve been clearer on the motivation to write the post.
Most people don’t like reading and really like dunking.
I feel great kinship with Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson, the authors of Abundance, who likewise have received a lot of attention from people who didn’t read their book and don’t know what they’re criticizing.
Do recent economic models bring any new insight compared to - let’s say - 1900 ? Real question.
One nitpicky point. It doesnt actually make sense to ask "do utility functions exist?". Preferences exist. Utility functions are just convenient representations of preferences which make analyzing preferences easy. Of course one can ask how likely is it that preferences are complete, transitive and continous (or least the first two) so that they can be represented by utility functions. Tbf economists themselves get sloppy here where they say stuff like "agents are endowed with a utility function" rather than the more precise "agents have preferences which can be represented by a utility function".
Also, demand functions - derived from utility and budget constraints - do in fact exist, we estimate them all the time and really that's all you need for 95% of Economics to work and to do empirical work