“Economics used to be about markets and predictions: tax rates, interest rates, fiscal policy, monetary policy. In short, about money.”

sidewalker says

And before that, economics used to be about full-employment and the greater public good.”

plnelson says -

No it was never about that.

Economics has always been an attempt to scientifically explain human choice behavior, especially how humans make decisions regarding scarcity or valuation.

plneson, you just do not go back far enough. If you are talking about mainstream economics, what you say holds, but if you travel further down the tree to political economics, you find that economics was very much concerned with the public good and not just understanding economic behavior. Prescriptive as well as descriptive. What Adam Smith says in The Wealth of Nations bears this out:

Political economy, considered as a branch of the science of a statesman or legislator, proposes two distinct objects: first, to supply a plentiful revenue or product for the people, or, more properly, to enable them to provide such a revenue or subsistence for themselves; and secondly, to supply the state or commonwealth with a revenue sufficient for the public services. It proposes to enrich both the people and the sovereign.

There is no question of DENYING the existence of free will. It’s really up to the proponents of “free will” to suggest a plausible basis for its existence.

In this universe we know about deterministic phenomena, for example in physics and chemistry, and non-deterministic phenomena, for example in quantum mechanics. Unfortunately, neither one provides a basis for a belief in free will. So unless you are prepared to introduce a new branch of physics and provude a basis to think the human brain operates under its influence, they there’s no point in talking about “free will”.

The problem is that none of the social and behavioral sciences are very scientifically rigorous. I don’t think that economics is any more rigorous than, say, sociology, but all of them WISH they were as rigorous as the physical and biological sciences, so they create arcane jargon and complex models, but they are really cargo-cult sciences : They hope that by adopting the outward form of the physical sciences some of the actual rigour of the sciences will rub off on them.

But the differences between the social sciences and the real ones is this: social scientists’ models are built of metaphors – there is no such thing as a “choice” or a “value” – these are epiphenomena of lower-level neurological processes. They are simply convenient conversational simplifications. By comparison, when a scientist refers to, say, calcium carbonate (CaCO3) he’s referring to something that’s physically real in the universe, not merely a concept or a metaphor.

“Economics used to be about markets and predictions: tax rates, interest rates, fiscal policy, monetary policy. In short, about money.

No it was never about that.

Saying that economics was “about” those things is like saying that atmospheric physics is “about” the Kyoto Treaty because policy makers use scientific input to try to set CO2 targets.

Economics has always been an attempt to scientifically explain human choice behavior, especially how humans make decisions regarding scarcity or valuation. Policy makers may attempt to apply economic throery to questions of employment, etc, but fundamentally economics is an attempt to study human behavior scientifically.

The big problem with the social and behavioral sciences (economics, sociology, psychology, etc) is that they are not scientific ENOUGH – they lack the scientific rigour, clear definitions, reliable data, control groups and hard-cscience grounding necessary to make good progress.

Please clarify my understanding of your point. Do social sciences/economics hinder human progress because these “unintended consequences” dont fit neatly into economists’ behavioral systems? Do social models rely too much on convenient data, sidestepping the fact that social science itself is a behavioral system?

No, that is not a corollary, as it assumes an economic or selfish motivation on the part of hydrologists to acquire the best water rights and for all I know some may finagle to obtain the premium water rights if they have the wherewithal.

While not every economist may be motivated to use his “scientific knowledge” for self enrichment, living in western society generally requires a threshold level of income for a comfortable existence. As economists are interested in economics it’s reasonable to think that if they actually could predict economic results with certainty (say as physics or chemistry can predict the outcomes of atomic reactions), that they would use “economic science” to increase their pecuniary comfort level.

My point was that so called “soft” sciences are not science at all but investigations of phenomena that are beyond the realm of true science and can’t be subjected to scientific method. When a phenomenon is approached scientifically, it means that methodological analysis is used to study it (but it isn’t science), in the case of predictable economics it’s basically simple math.

In the case of meteorology or hydrology it’s complex math and while in principle outcomes could be predicted (as they are composed of physical elements that obey physical laws) with enough knowledge of initial or contributing conditions, in reality only the most general outcomes are predictable (and often wrong).

In social science the components that are subject to analysis are abstract and largely hypothetical and IMO will never be elevated to the realm of hard science.

In the brief perusal of the silvio.rabioso above as I was posting this, I believe he has stated the situation succinctly and correctly. Nice analysis Silvio!!

Peace to ALL,

Jazzman

Once Kant cleaved positive science from metaphysical speculation (done most convincingly in his Critique of Pure Reason of the 1780s), the social sciences were free to propose models of predictable human behavior. Kant told his Enlightenment listeners to avoid what he called the logical traps (paralogisms) of questions about the soul, God and free will. Once the metaphysician no longer had to worry about free will, the scientist (and later, the social scientist) was free to act as if that philosophical problem no longer existed.

By bracketing off these metaphysical problems (again: God, free will and the soul), the social sciences have created models of humankind that work on simple (but now increasingly complex) theories of correlation and causality. Humans (or even…gasp…human systems) behave according to model A; any deviation from this model is labeled an “externality.” The irony here is that in the very moment when an individual or a group asserts free will, he/she/it is discarded and euphemized as ‘outlier’, ‘externality’ or ‘unintended consequence’.

Economics, and especially behavioral economics, MUST deny the existence of free will. If economics is able to predict human behavior, is does only because it assumes that a human being will ALWAYS behave in a certain way under a given set of circumstances…i.e. no autonomy.

Fast-forward two hundred years: we have social scientists claiming to operate in a philosophical manner as they use strictly positivist methodology to explore metaphysical questions. The tweaks and refinements to rational choice theory that pass for advances in the social sciences and analytic philosophy remind me of the ever-more subtle spheres introduced into the Ptolemaic astronomical system to keep up with observed phenomena. But like Copernicus showed the world that he had a more elegant explanation that truly accounted for the nature of the universe he knew, so too will philosophers cut through the absurd rhetoric of a ‘kinder, gentler economics’ to show the poverty of the social scientist’s view of the interrelationship of humans and nature.

Or, in the words of a Bolivian living without land rights or access to affordable water, or those of a South African who cannot purchase life-saving medications because of something called IP rights, or from an Argentine who had his life savings converted into worthless paper in December of 2001: “What have economics done for me lately?”

So I was driving along this AM and lo and behold this report comes over the BBC on the gender imbalance in China.

Chinese family planning policy has only allowed only one child per family ( I believe since the 1980’s). Since so many preferred to have boys (with the help of ultrasound and abortions) so many males were born that by 2020 there will be 30 million more men than women, a pronounced gender imbalance.

The report says that because of this girls have their pick of husbands. Also there is an increase in prostitution and trafficking of women. As well, women will be marrying younger and younger. And there are more mental problems among men.

The males that make or have the most money are the ones that will have the best chance of marrying. In poorest parts of China, the rural areas, men will not be able to find wives and their families are saving for dowries.

All of this has economic implications. For one, incentives for achieving financial success will become very strong.