TL;DR: economists are still stuck in the idea of the market as a perfect force for reaching optimal outcomes. They’re ignoring the simple fact that businesses are putting prices up purely to increase profits. And that they can do this because the economic ideal of perfect competition (where many small firms compete with near-identical products) does not exist. We have a small number of very powerful businesses—oligopolies—in nearly every market for consumer-facing goods.
Economists aren’t really in denial, they are just doing their job of giving a false sense of scientific legitimacy to the plan the ruling class will enact anyways: discipline labor, cut social spending, bail out finance when they inevitably crash.
Aye, there’s a reason economics is called “the dismal science.”
Because it is not a science.
A founding principle of economics is that people make rational economic decisions…
Perfect information is my favourite !
“With perfect information in a market, all consumers and producers have complete and instantaneous knowledge of all market prices, their own utility, and own cost functions.”
Pure Economic is a science, but popular implemented Economic is a pseudoscience at best. It has been corrupted by commercial interests.
Different types of science are derivative of other forms of science. Physics is just applied Mathematics, Chemistry is applied Physics, Biology is just just applied Chemistry, Psychology is just applied Biology and Mathematics is applied Psychology.
Pure Economics is an amalgam of Psychology and Mathematics.
Economic Rationalism is a oxymoron because Economic relies on irrational psychology and is subject to change based on observations.
A statement is not a fact. Prove your statement.
This implies Psychology thinks people are rational, it does no such thing.
You are almost there:
Economics is a science is a oxymoron because Economics relies on irrational people being rational.
That last statement is one view of one theory (that happens to be the predominant one), it’s not like this is a fundamental tenet of economics.
But you might like behavioural economics and doughnut economics as alternative views that don’t hold the individual as rational actors.
Exactly. There is science-based economics and there’s also pseudoscience economics. They exist next to each other. It’s a similar situation as in medicine.
Physics will approximate a cow as a sphere, which you can observe it is not.
In science theory you have to make assumptions and approximations to simplify and get at the underlying mehanics. THEN you can complicate everything with the reality of it all.
What got me off conservatism is the fact that even Friedman wanted a Welfare System through negative tax returns.
However that idea was absolutely dismissed by conservatives.
Who’s going to fund the new economics building at the University, the working class or some billionaire? Better make sure you don’t have any Marxists on staff.
I’d rather my taxes go to better universities instead of the war machine. But that would require the government in this country to do a 180 from where they’ve had their priorities for the last 70+ years.
Well yeah, universities have been starved of government funding for decades, so they raised tuitions, and have been turning to philanthropy to build new infrastructure. And you can bet that the funding for that new building came with more strings attached than just naming it after John Q Richcunt.