UK EU Referendum Aftermath

vimothy

vimothy

yurp
Sorry, I must have missed them. What were the examples?

EDIT: Do you mean that GDP varies cyclically over the business cycle? This is just a regularity. It's not something that economics has established. Economists want to explain it, somehow. But, as of yet, they cannot.
 
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vimothy

vimothy

yurp
sadmanbarty said:
Your qualms with the methodology (as I understand them) are also true for lots of disciplines considered science such as huge swathes of astrophysics. I don't know if you say those things aren't science either.
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I don't think that's actually true for astrophysics. I remember having conversations with my Dad (an empirical astrochemist) where he explained the evidentiary basis for most results in astrophysics, but, again, I don't know anything about astrophysics, whereas I know a fair bit about econ.
 
Mr. Tea

Mr. Tea

Let's Talk About Ceps
sadmanbarty said:
Again, just to clarify, I don't actually think that. I was taking Vim's critique of economics and applying it to another science. I was referring to these, which I posted earlier:

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/ear...dmit-global-warming-forecasts-were-wrong.html

http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2016/apr/7/climate-change-models-wrong-predicting-rain-drough/

Just to be clear I think that climate scientists, medical professionals and economists all know the most about there respective fields and should be trusted when it comes to implementing government policy. I'm in no way a climate change denier.
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Forgive me if I'm missing something obvious here (or even something very subtle), but if your argument relies on claiming that climatologists can't predict anything, and then you admit that you accept they can in fact make predictions with some degree of rigour, then doesn't your whole argument fall apart? Also I don't see how you're pointing out the "flaws" in anyone's logic if you're going to toss around the words "weather" and "climate" as if they're synonymous.
 
S

sadmanbarty

Well-known member
vimothy said:
I don't think that's actually true for astrophysics. I remember having conversations with my Dad (an empirical astrochemist) where he explained the evidentiary basis for most results in astrophysics, but, again, I don't know anything about astrophysics, whereas I know a fair bit about econ.
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Sounds like you know more about astrophysics than me at least. Would I be wrong in thinking that there are theories that haven't been tested in controlled experiments? Likewise are there phenomena that haven't been observed often enough to definitively prove repeatable outcomes? If this is indeed the case, I'd argue that, though flawed, these things are still (imperfect) science as long as they comply with other tenets of scientific methodology.
 
Mr. Tea

Mr. Tea

Let's Talk About Ceps
sadmanbarty said:
Sounds like you know more about astrophysics than me at least. Would I be wrong in thinking that there are theories that haven't been tested in controlled experiments? Likewise are there phenomena that haven't been observed often enough to definitively prove repeatable outcomes? If this is indeed the case, I'd argue that, though flawed, these things are still (imperfect) science as long as they comply with other tenets of scientific methodology.
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http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hulse–Taylor_binary

Two guys won the 1993 Nobel in physics for discovering a type of binary star system (co-orbiting neutron stars, one of which is also a pulsar). The system is losing energy in a way described by general relativity. The behaviour of the system can be predicted, and has been predicted, to an astonishing degree of accuracy.

450px-PSR_B1913%2B16_period_shift_graph.svg.png


So no, you don't need laboratory experiments in order to demonstrate that you're doing 'proper science'.
 
S

sadmanbarty

Well-known member
Mr. Tea said:
Forgive me if I'm missing something obvious here (or even something very subtle), but 1) if your argument relies on claiming that climatologists can't predict anything, and then you admit that you accept they can in fact make predictions with some degree of rigour, then doesn't your whole argument fall apart? 2) Also I don't see how you're pointing out the "flaws" in anyone's logic if you're going to toss around the words "weather" and "climate" as if they're synonymous.
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1) You've completely missed what I'm saying (which may well be my own, inarticulate fault). My personal opinion is that climate scientists are correct about most things in their field and there predictions should be taken seriously. I'm saying it would be ridiculous to dismiss the whole field because they happened to get some forecasts wrong (which is what I feel Vim is saying about economics). So when I say anti-climate science things imagine a pair of quotation marks around them; I'm doing an impression of Vim's logic, which I'm arguing against. It's sarcasm. I'm taking his logic and applying it to another science, those statements in no way reflect my opinion.

2) Someone's logic being flawed and my inaccurate classifications are totally unrelated.
 
vimothy

vimothy

yurp
I'm not dismissing the field of economics because it's incapable of forecasting accurately. (I'm quite fond of it actually, spent time studying it, did research in it, etc, etc). I was responding to your argument about economics being a science because "employment, inflation, balance of payments, etc. are all quantifiable and measurable and thus you can objectively say if they've gone up or down".

But economics is not science (under any reasonable definition of the term - e.g., theories get falsified empirically). There are no definitive results in economics which everyone accepts as the result of (the proper application of) the scientific method. Whether GDP is a numerical variable or not (as it happens, it's an extremely messy abstraction), is not the point. There are no established "facts". There's just a bunch of people hacking away in the dark.
 
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S

sadmanbarty

Well-known member
Sorry, I shouldn't have said "dismissed", that was a mischaracterisation of what you said. Apologies.

I agree with a lot of what you're saying and as such I'd class economics as a soft science. I understand not wanting to refer to the social sciences in general as science, but neither do I think economics should be referred to as 'hacking away in the dark' or compared to history. It does use scientific methodology (imperfectly) and there are general laws and principles that can be applied to attain certain results (or at least make those results more likely), such as fiscal stimulus during a liquidity trap.

If that's not concrete enough to be classed as science, I suppose that's fair enough. On the other hand I think it's more accurate than conjecture or informed guessing. I'd say 'soft science' is a pretty useful description.

Thanks for indulging me. I'm going to give the politics threads a rest for a bit, so I might not respond for a while.
 
Mr. Tea

Mr. Tea

Let's Talk About Ceps
sadmanbarty said:
I'm saying it would be ridiculous to dismiss the whole field because they happened to get some forecasts wrong (which is what I feel Vim is saying about economics)
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My understanding of vim's position is that economic forecasts are always wrong, or if not literally always, then they're only ever occasionally right by accident ("even a stopped clock tells the right time twice a day") or inasmuch as they can, in a very general and descriptive way, track boom/bust cycles without really having any clue why they happen. In kind of the same way that people have always known night follows day and winter follows summer, but that's not the same thing as having an accurate model of the solar system.
 
vimothy

vimothy

yurp
Economic theory is useless for forecasting. You can get better results from a simple random process (like an AR(1) model - which is one of the simplest stochastic models that exists). It's also not good at reproducing past behaviour, and one of the big failings of the current crop of macro models is their inability to generate data that approximate past cycles without doing awful shit under the hood (see this epic thread at EJMR for some prominent examples).
 
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vimothy

vimothy

yurp
Macro is a really pathological case, though. It might a different story in micro related fields like industrial organisation.
 
vimothy

vimothy

yurp
sadmanbarty said:
Thanks for indulging me. I'm going to give the politics threads a rest for a bit, so I might not respond for a while.
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Sorry, just noticed this. I don't think I was indulging you - we had a good argument. And I'm sure there are plenty of economists who would agree that their discipline is indeed a science.

Anyway, in case you feel like reading a bit more, you might enjoy this recent paper by Paul Romer. He discusses the strange cul de sac macroeconomics has found itself in, in a relatively accessible and even witty (for an American macroeconomist) way:

https://paulromer.net/wp-content/uploads/2016/09/WP-Trouble.pdf
 
Mr. Tea

Mr. Tea

Let's Talk About Ceps
I think I heard/read someone say that Brexit could put the kibosh on TTIP - anyone here agree, or is it just wishful thinking? There has to be some silver lining to this vast faecal cloud.
 
luka

luka

Well-known member
Wishful. Even if defeated it will keep coming back with a slightly different acronym attached to it. Those agendas don't get defeated they just get delayed.
 
Mr. Tea

Mr. Tea

Let's Talk About Ceps
Yeah, that's basically what I thought. We're gonna get shafted one way or another.

More shafted.
 
Leo

Leo

Well-known member
Corpsey said:
Long piece from the NYT about the backlash against free trade which has helped Trump and Farage out lately:

http://www.nytimes.com/2016/09/29/b...veryone-what-fuels-the-backlash-on-trade.html
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if free trade deals go away, the same americans who've railed against them will eventually start complaining about the loss of cheap goods. those manufacturing factories in the rust belt ain't coming back anytime soon, if ever. i feel for people without college degrees living in those areas who've seen their manufacturing jobs disappear, not easy for them to simply retrain or relocate. a fucked situation, but campaign rhetoric from a demagogue isn't the solution to their problems.
 
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