Can you also put into words why? Sincere question, not being snarky; I also know the feeling of something feeling off but not knowing how to express it in words (yet).
Not op, but also from economics background - the issue with economics in public perception for me is that is't became modern "religion"/ideology and moved far from proper science. Especially "mainstream" economics theory.
So the issue is not that it's getting misinterpreted due to lack of understanding. The issue there is that it's getting unscientific and politicised purposefully.
Great book on this is James Kwak's "Economism" - the abuse of purported economic insight for political purposes.
As just one simple example, good old Hekscher-Olin trade theory (a neat general equilibrium model with 2 countries, 2 goods, and 2 factors of production, capital and labor) "shows" that free trade is a good thing, leading to a Pareto improvement.
But of course, that's predicated on a whole host of assumptions that might or might not hold, and furthermore predicated on the assumption that the "winners" compensate the "losers", through redistribution.
So, the economic case for free trade more or less includes the case for redistribution and compensation of those negatively affected by it - but that's often conveniently left out by proponents.
Popular economics and popular "AI" as described in the article both seem like situations where everybody with an idea to push cites popularisation of research conclusions without understanding the limitations to the models and people with actual expertise in the field are often happy to play along with these hyperbolic, caveat-free popularisations because it helps their end goals.
Sure, the economics profession and its popularisers might be a little more incentivised by political aims and AI research and AI's hypers and commercialisers a little more by money, but both fields suffer from the fact whilst researchers agonise over tradeoffs between tractability and predictive accuracy and fitting and overfitting and wonder whether the class of problem they're looking at is even soluble, the people with the most confidence in their assertions tend to get the column inches, even if they barely know what they're talking about.
I only wonder whether it will ultimately lead to similarly widespread middlebrow dismissals[1] of the entire field of AI...
[1]for the avoidance of doubt, not an accusation I'm levelling at the poster above
Right, but this is a political problem. H-O (or Ricardian trade) is about the simplest model of trade you can come up with to show the concept.
It's not like economists don't know there are problems in distribution of wealth -- one of the most discussed papers last year (see these podcasts [1] [2]) talks about the effects of China massively expanding trade with the US in early 2000s on some parts of the country.
Pretty much everyone has known for half a century what trade does, there's a political and logistical problem in redistribution, though (counties tend to get devastated, and people don't like to move).
Interestingly, trade has extremely similar labor market effects to automation.
Is you "economics background" a BA, by any chance?
The people who say economics "became religion" are usually those whose only exposure to economics is through secondhand knowledge (ie. they read about it in media) or took a handful of undergraduate classes.
Take a look at what modern economics research looks like [1]. Seriously, read __any__ of those articles and come tell me with a straight face it's not doing normal science (come up with theory, test with empirical data).
Economics is the most scientific it's ever been, most graduate curriculum, and even some undergrad, are veering towards the applied statistics arm of economics because it's what's been most successful in the last 20 years. Granted there are empirical problems in, say, macro, but that's mainly due to lack of data.
Economics is also probably the most politicized it's been in a long time at the moment, I agree with you in that. Apart from a few venues like Planet Money or Freakonomics, there isn't much pop-economics like there is pop-science in other fields like physics. Moreover, the incentive to politicize economics is much greater than other sciences.
Yup, I'm quite familiar with what modern economics research looks like. My problem with them start when I get to "We now use formal econometric techniques", when they get very limited model with huge amount of assumptions and then draw some conclusions from that.
Math checks out. No questions about that (Although there's always stories about reproducibility of results). But after that there's huge gap, when you try to extrapolate the conclusions of the model to the real world precisely due to assumptions/limitations of the model.
I am rather sceptical about this approach - it's formal to the point where "my model of my virtual world totally works due to ideal nature of this world and mathematical logic", or "we managed to fit our model to carefully selected dataset". Yes, it's formal 'scientific methodology', yes small scope research is the practical way to publish paper after paper (the only real 'currency' in scientific world), but again it seems just to be 'safe haven' for economists, when they are abstracted from real world enough to not interfere with real politics. As with biology in Darwin times, when it was fine to be clergyman and study biology (but mainly in taxonomy sense - listing all 'god creatures' and not thinking about origin of species)
Also, "The people who say economics "became religion" are usually those whose only exposure to economics is through secondhand knowledge (ie. they read about it in media) or took a handful of undergraduate classes." - yup, the same as some nobel laureates like Krugman or Hayek.
Can we agree that the state of the scientific field is as good as a decisions taken based on the achievements in this field?
This is actually very similar to the issues HCI suffered from a few decades ago, and which indirectly lead to Interaction Design trying to separate itself from it. The former was too dogmatic about trying to apply quantitative models to everything, and the latter consciously said "nope, we're going to go look at the humanities, anthropology, and all other fields known for qualitative research and see what we can learn from there to make better human-oriented designs".
(mind you, this was before the term "UX design" got diluted to "graphic design for webpages and buttons on touch interfaces")
> Can we agree that the state of the scientific field is as good as a decisions taken based on the achievements in this field?
Certainly not, or else climate science would still be in thorough disagreement about whether or not there's climate change and/or how anthropogenic it is.
Even if you have massive amounts of evidence pointing to something, if it goes against entrenched interests, nothing is going to be done.
Also, you need to differentiate Krugman the political commentator and Krugman the economist. He's much more of the former these days, posts labeled "wonkish" are generally from the latter. The fault is on him, though, for discrediting himself that way.
> Certainly not, or else climate science would still be in thorough disagreement
Looking at Europe - I see the decisions, policies and agreement. Looking at USA I see conscious decision to ignore the science predictions when it suits some political goals in short term and not to ignore when it's vital - like when planning military strategy in Middle East.
The US (and Canada and Australia) are bad on climate change because they have entrenched interests in fossil fuels which leads to political lobbying.
Europe doesn't have those specific problems, but it has others.
Politicians will do whatever has political benefits to them. Economic benefits, or even reality, are purely secondary. You might get the occasional exceptionally altruistic politician, but the average one will act on his incentives.
This is why you see stuff like the Reinhart & Rogoff paper, which never passed peer review, touted for austerity politics even long after it was retracted. Austerity is popular with a part of the population and politicians will use whatever to justify whatever they're trying to do.
Judging anything on its political success is nonsense
Sure. The first NBER paper in [1] features the following jewel (p.34):
"B. Calibration
To quantitatively decompose the contribution of different factors to the growth of shadow banks and fintech firms, we first have to calibrate the model to the conforming loan market data."
I can tell you with a straight face that is not normal science. Economists themselves increasingly recognize so-called "calibration" is a farce.
If the paper gets traction and the model specification is indeed not robust, the first thing you'll see in a few months is something like "paper xyz: comment" driving holes in the methodology getting even more traction. Empirical microeconomics is fairly open about methodology flaws and critiques.
Also, by the way, you see pretty much the same type of thing in a ton of fMRI neuroscience, medical and psychology studies (even the ones you'll later see on NPR or ted talks). You shouldn't ever believe any one empirical result in basically anything except maybe CERN particle physics type work.
Your response, and the ostensible fact my critique went completely over your head, probably shows you should definitely spend more time familiarizing yourself with the discipline, before going around defending it.
You should start with 'calibration' in economics. No, it is not quite what you (seem to) think it is. No, it is not quite "the same type of thing" as p-hacking and low-powered studies in psychology. (Whose poor reliability, by the way, is almost common knowledge by now.)
My point is that it's very easy to check "model calibration" (eg. "Plug values from outside data"). Just run the code with different values.
Because it's so easy to check those things (assuming the data is not proprietary or whatnot) I'd argue it's a much lesser problem than the "garden of forking paths" in lab experiments where it's much harder to test robustness of the result.
Moreover, I don't think anyone intelligent is foolish enough to take the coefficients in an econometric study literally; at least I would hope not.
In more established field it tends to be that people outside the field exaggerate things because the can't put them into the context of the field i.e. they lack domain knowledge. In "tech" it seem like it's the people in the field that exaggerate things because they can't put them into the context of the world.
