Their whole world view is polluted by their “I’m rich therefore I must deserve it and I must be better than others”. You can’t grasp much when you think like that.
They aren’t dumb, they just don’t give any fucks. All they care about is giving more and more tax breaks to their masters, our billionaie oligarchs. And they say anything regardless of truth, logic, sanity - anything that sounds good in the moment to get power, keep power.
They’re well into the negative fucks tbh.
Fucks… taken? heh
Gives me a sad because a “fuck taken” sounds like rape, which they certainly are rather worse about, sooooo… :/
The heritage foundation.
Since the 70s they have been directing GOP policy.
The GOP is not dumb about economics, they know exactly who benefits from their policies. Republican voters may not understand it, but politicians do.
Nah, this used to be the case, but now enough of them have drank the koolade, they actually believe the nonsense far beyond what serves the grift. You can see it in the way their policies of the past 20 years keep fucking up the broader economy in ways which don’t really help anyone. You can see it in how the GOP has basically given itself over to Christian Nationalism, which is an ideological minefield, and frequently at odds with the will of the oligarchy.
Part of why this is so scary is because a standard con artist is still a rational actor. They might rationally fuck you over, but at the end of the day they will operate within a fairly predictable set of boundaries. Political and religious zealots famously don’t have those guardrails. And now what we have is the worst possible scenario - Christian nationalists who will subvert democracy for sky daddy, and Trumpists who will subvert democracy over their orange daddy aggrievememt complex.
I would argue they’re pretty dumb when it comes to economics, but they’re good at enriching themselves. None of them see that the long term leads to a destitute America, which means most of them end up being dragged down too. A prosperous America benefits everyone, a destitute one “helps” a very select few, which will not include all of them.
I think there are those who are playing dumb, like Cruz and McConnell, but you’ve got your Tubervilles and your Mark Wayne’s who really have drunk the middle school, edgelord koolaid.
End of the day though, dumb or playing dumb, you’ve got a whole party who continually tank the economy ever time they get into office and an electorate that eats up their lies.
McConnell
A secret corpse can’t play dumb
Markwayne bought a local plumbing business and a did exactly what a private equity firm would have done an now it’s one of the largest and most advertised plumbing businesses in the area and yet for decades it constantly has shit reviews.
Maybe he just got lucky, but it sure seems like there’s a lot of these dumbasses who have successful businesses and have successfully navigated the capitalist hellscape in the background.
I wouldn’t underestimate their ability to funnel money to the top while looking like they have no idea what they’re doing.
I am so sick of sociopathy being a winning strategy.
There’s a certain type of low cunning (that’s separate from intelligence) that’s a perfect fit for capitalism.
Those are the only people you will find in upper levels of government. Liars and obedient idiots.
Yep. They didn’t get rich by being dumb. They did it by keeping everyone else dumb.
In our time, the economics profession has undergone tremendous change for the better, and those neoclassical nostrums have been subjected to intense scrutiny by a new generation of economists who have seen with their own two eyes that markets do not always self-correct (another neoclassical assertion) and that sometimes, government intervention is required to achieve good ends.
Republican politicians didn’t get the memo. ** Nor did the American electorate. ** So it’s very easy to tell people, for example, that you’re going to open up federal lands to more drilling, and there’ll be more oil, and prices will go down. That’s about as much economics as your average person remembers from high school, and it makes intuitive sense.
That’s your actual root cause right there.
They’re greedy and don’t give a shit about anything else. That’s it. Their votes are being sold to the highest bidder.
Economics, as an intellectual discipline, is closer to theology than physics. Its power is proportional to the belief it commands.
Finance is an arbitrary subset of mathematics, cherry picked by the owning class, and applied as their supporting mythology.
It’s entirely imaginary, which means alternatives are only ever a conjuring away.
Brother, you are high as a kite
What they said is actually totally reasonable. People (particularly economists) treat economics as though it’s a hard science akin to physics or chemistry, but it’s a soft science. They gave David Card a nobel in economics for figuring out a way to actually test hypotheses some of the time. In 2021.
Econ is math explaining how anything affects markets, it uses actual logic to explain changes. Give me some examples of how theology uses math to explain anything
- Pascal used probability/expected-value reasoning to argue that wagering on God is rational.
- Gödel formally encoded an argument for God’s existence in higher-order modal logic.
- Plantinga uses modal logic to formulate the ontological argument.
- Bayes’ theorem used to argue for the existence of God by Richard Swinburne.
People use math to justify things. That is not the same as proving something. Show me cases where econs use math to prove something intrinsic to economies.
In the bible one plus one plus one equals one or three or something.
Sounds like a lie that Satan would want me to believe
The holy trinity is one god the exists as three separate people.
It’s in the bible.
1+1=6, got it
Give me examples of economists coming up with hypotheses and then building experiments to test them.
The 2008 financial crisis?
The global financial crisis was a huge surprise to most economists and is basically the #1 example of the field not having any predictive power, something you generally want from a hard science.
I mean, that’s an experimental result. It’s not a positive result, but it is a result.
Where’s the flaw in my comment?
I went to uni for business admin with a concentration in finance and I disagree with all of it.
Econ is a social science that studies the effects decisions have on a market, it uses math to explain it. Econ is not the cause, econ is the study of.
Finance is not an arbitrary subset of mathematics. It’s calculus, derivatives, and polynomial models that predict and explain.
You may as well call math and logic imaginary
it uses math to explain it
It uses math sometimes.
Economics is not a hard science. Which is fine. But let’s not pretend it’s all math and logic. It includes attempting to predict human behavior, you can’t do that with just math.
“Do people think we’re currently in a recession” is actually used by economists as a recession indicator.
I think you may need to simply define the terms used after “calculus.” I just did two things that oddly coincide with having read this comment. One, skipped a YT video that promised to simply explain calculus, and two, commented elsewhere:
"One thing that really scares me about the fall of the empire of my birth is, even if a revolution succeeded, not only who would be in charge, but would they actually understand large scale administration, distribution, logistics, of goods and finance? We’ve allowed ourselves to be so proudly uneducated for si long, because “There are professionals for that.” Well, yes, but honest ones?“
Edit, because I should add, an honest one that actually will be appointed to the task.
Except in terms of predictive power it’s just barely more successful than random chance. As a discipline it’s still largely in its most primitive stage, and still full of unproven and largely hypothetical assumptions that amount to little more than idle musings and superstitions. It’s so full of holes it’s just slightly more rigorous than pseudoscience. Perhaps in 100 years it will develop into a more respectable discipline, but at this stage it’s at best a tool for short term modelling and post hoc analysis.
in my experience, Econ education is the study of a single economic system - capitalism. Did they ever discuss alternative socioeconomic systems or simply say ‘state ownership = bad’?
This isn’t true, though. Economics is a material study of social relations that objectively exist and are reinforced by how we produce and distribute. Bourgeois economics tends towards idealism, turning it from materialism. We cannot simply “conjure” a new system. Systems are material processes, and so we must take a scientific, rather than utopian, approach.
