Funnily enough the metaphor of someone carrying a compass around with a magnet so “north” is always the direction they want it to be is a pretty good one for how economic policy under neoliberal capitalism has been going. So committed to being wrong they ended up right by accident.
Funnily enough the metaphor of someone carrying a compass around with a magnet so “north” is always the direction they want it to be is a pretty good one
This isn’t just an opinion btw, this is literally how economic liberalism was born. The Austrian schoolof thought of economics proudly believes in “praxeology”:
I knew it was bad but I didn’t realize it was that bad.
it is possible to draw conclusion about human behavior that are both objective and universal.
I thought the whole “rational actor” thing came with the implication that it’s your fault if you don’t act rationally (which is already bullshit ofc), not an assumption that everyone does act rationally. They actually think they can universally predict human behavior?
Austrian [economists] argue that… empirical data cannot falsify economic theory.
“My theory is perfect. I can predict exactly what people will do. If my predictions are wrong that doesn’t prove my theory wrong. Nothing can prove my theory wrong because it’s not.”
Yeah, those are the origins of economic liberalism. They’ve tried to camouflage into a science more nowadays and they don’t openly reject empirism, they just do it constantly but don’t admit it. For example, there’s infinite evidence that money creation by a central bank doesn’t lead to inflation, and they will die arguing on that hill regardless. They will also outright reject the possibility of planning an economy and use the same “economy calculation problem” arguments that the Austrian school of thought used 200 years ago, without realizing that computers exist and Amazon and Walmart already do economic planning on the scale of entire small-sized country economies.
I had a course on “Introdução à Economia Matemática”, something like (my translation) “Introduction to Mathematical Economics” on IMPA, a top-class Mathematics research institute in Rio de Janeiro. The professor commented (again, my translation):
In economics, whenever a person begins to care a little bit about other people, we declare them irrational.
Funnily enough the metaphor of someone carrying a compass around with a magnet so “north” is always the direction they want it to be is a pretty good one for how economic policy under neoliberal capitalism has been going. So committed to being wrong they ended up right by accident.
This isn’t just an opinion btw, this is literally how economic liberalism was born. The Austrian schoolof thought of economics proudly believes in “praxeology”:
I knew it was bad but I didn’t realize it was that bad.
I thought the whole “rational actor” thing came with the implication that it’s your fault if you don’t act rationally (which is already bullshit ofc), not an assumption that everyone does act rationally. They actually think they can universally predict human behavior?
“My theory is perfect. I can predict exactly what people will do. If my predictions are wrong that doesn’t prove my theory wrong. Nothing can prove my theory wrong because it’s not.”
Yeah, those are the origins of economic liberalism. They’ve tried to camouflage into a science more nowadays and they don’t openly reject empirism, they just do it constantly but don’t admit it. For example, there’s infinite evidence that money creation by a central bank doesn’t lead to inflation, and they will die arguing on that hill regardless. They will also outright reject the possibility of planning an economy and use the same “economy calculation problem” arguments that the Austrian school of thought used 200 years ago, without realizing that computers exist and Amazon and Walmart already do economic planning on the scale of entire small-sized country economies.
I had a course on “Introdução à Economia Matemática”, something like (my translation) “Introduction to Mathematical Economics” on IMPA, a top-class Mathematics research institute in Rio de Janeiro. The professor commented (again, my translation):
I keep trying to make jokes and I keep finding out that no it do really be like that