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Budget Day
Wednesday, March 20th, 2013 11:04 amWriting as someone with a social science degree, I have to say that I rather despise the term. I’m not sure I have a flattering alternative appellation for the genre and as a subject I would like to detach history from it so that the study of history is not debased by association.
Of all the social sciences, I think the one that annoys me most is economics. In fact I know it’s the one that annoys me most. With psychology, social psychology, anthropology, sociology and even political science, practitioners may be earnest and erudite, but there are enough of them competing and the subjects so relatively niche, that the fact that most of them are sciences in much the way that late medieval chemistry as a science was closely entwined with alchemy doesn’t matter greatly. I can see parallels with those climatologists who draw horrific conclusions from a few years’ weather patterns.
But with economics, people who really ought to know better, tout hypotheses as facts and apply these hypotheses dogmatically and rigidly, with an absolute religious certainty. They become convinced that because mathematicians and statisticians have expended an ever expanding amount of nervous energy massaging data that may or may not be accurate, data that they hope measure what they purport to measure, and then filtered them through the political bias of their masters, that they have the answer. The immutable answer. The correct answer.
In each case, another worthy, with an equally impressive armada of mathematicians and statisticians, armed with the same data, the same brain power, but a divergent agenda, will argue equally persuasively and backed up with appropriately whimsical examples, the precise opposite of the other.
While this is all going on, people, the social element in the science, are behaving in quite another manner, one which may not be quantifiable in mathematical terms and only identifiable statistically after the event.
The point is quite simple: economics only demonstrably works in detail during the short term and in broad sweeps over the incomprehensibly long term. At any point, beyond the simplest of examples based upon supply and demand curves, pronouncements of certainty are futile.
The day may come when economics can major on the science and minor on the social, but that day has not yet arrived. At the moment, the economic destinies of us all (with the possible exception of the super-rich and the gruellingly poor) are effectively in the hands of astrologers pretending to be astronomers and alchemists playing at chemistry and physics.
Of all the social sciences, I think the one that annoys me most is economics. In fact I know it’s the one that annoys me most. With psychology, social psychology, anthropology, sociology and even political science, practitioners may be earnest and erudite, but there are enough of them competing and the subjects so relatively niche, that the fact that most of them are sciences in much the way that late medieval chemistry as a science was closely entwined with alchemy doesn’t matter greatly. I can see parallels with those climatologists who draw horrific conclusions from a few years’ weather patterns.
But with economics, people who really ought to know better, tout hypotheses as facts and apply these hypotheses dogmatically and rigidly, with an absolute religious certainty. They become convinced that because mathematicians and statisticians have expended an ever expanding amount of nervous energy massaging data that may or may not be accurate, data that they hope measure what they purport to measure, and then filtered them through the political bias of their masters, that they have the answer. The immutable answer. The correct answer.
In each case, another worthy, with an equally impressive armada of mathematicians and statisticians, armed with the same data, the same brain power, but a divergent agenda, will argue equally persuasively and backed up with appropriately whimsical examples, the precise opposite of the other.
While this is all going on, people, the social element in the science, are behaving in quite another manner, one which may not be quantifiable in mathematical terms and only identifiable statistically after the event.
The point is quite simple: economics only demonstrably works in detail during the short term and in broad sweeps over the incomprehensibly long term. At any point, beyond the simplest of examples based upon supply and demand curves, pronouncements of certainty are futile.
The day may come when economics can major on the science and minor on the social, but that day has not yet arrived. At the moment, the economic destinies of us all (with the possible exception of the super-rich and the gruellingly poor) are effectively in the hands of astrologers pretending to be astronomers and alchemists playing at chemistry and physics.