this post was submitted on 23 Oct 2024
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Economics
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The Nobel Prize for Economics is not part of the same org as the other Nobels. It was invented by bankers that felt left out of the prestige, which of course they should be, economics isn't a science and their approach to issuing prizes is just whatever they feel like every year.
As an example, Paul Krugman is an actual fool, like he says really embarrassingly foolish things all the time, and they gave a prize to that guy because he spent his time writing apologetics for imperialist trade networks. I would feel awful to be endorsed by many Economics Nobel winners. It means I did something very wrong.
Anyways I do recommend that every read up on economic topics, particularly political economics. It will look opaque at first, but it is actually not a particularly deep field, you can understand enough of it to critically engage with just a few years of casual reading. And then you can form your own opinions on policy.
I agree that economics has serious problems that can leave it looking like a shriveled science not worthy of the title "science". There is a reason for this. Economics has been undermined for more than a hundred years.
When capitalism was born, classical economics had the goal of describing and understanding these new dynamics. It sought to answer questions such as how prices are determined or how labor dynamics affected profits, to name a few. It came up with answers through observation, statistical modeling, and what we would call today the scientific process.
It was later, in the late eighteenth century, that economics shriveled as a science and bloomed as an ideological and political tool. Many of the classical observations —such as how pricing is set by firms, how costs change through time, or how labor affects the production process— were scrapped. This new perspective didn't see the market as turbulent, war-like, and aggressively cost-cutting. Rather, it portrayed the market as a perfectly lubricated machine that optimally distributes resources, maximizing personal utility as well as social utility.
This perfect machine was not science, but a political tool so that classical economists wouldn't dare being critical of market economies. Even more so, this perfect machine was built so that politicians would not dare interrupt the motions of the machine.
If you're interested in learning how this perfect machine was built and how classical economics sees the world, you can check out Anwar Shaikh.
Yes, I agree of course. Just letting people dip their toes with one revelation at a time!