How can economics be a real science if money isn’t real?
Seriously, because economics is the science of the distribution of scarce resources to meet human need.
Unfortunately that instantly gives that game away that the optimal economy is a command economy with perfect information so they have to make up shit to make markets sound good rather than “We’re worse than useless at our jobs so just randomness is better than letting us do things”
It’s less “money isn’t real so economics isn’t real” and more: “Economics is a bunch of bowtie wearing dipshit working backwards from conclusions they’ve already come in order to force the data to say what they want.” But that’s not as catchy. Alternatively you could say: “Economics is a bunch of made up bullshit for failed engineering students to study because those students think studying an real science like sociology would make them gay.”
In the west in the last 50 years, yes, absolutely.
That said there is quite a bit of good stuff in it that’s just mostly ignored. Even Keynes isn’t entirely a lost cause. I mean, most people here are pretty cool on Cybersyn and it’s earlier Soviet efforts, and those were built on some pretty standard economics.
Yeah we ran the numbers and it turns out the most efficient distribution of resources is for me to have all of them and you to have none. Yeah I hear you but I’m just reading off the card here what the science says, look I’m just as surprised as you are.
economics is an observation of behavior with just a shit ton of calipers with differing levels of transparency
Richard D Wolff has the best explanation for economics as a subject of study, in that economics scholars don’t exist to map out the economy and work out accurate predictions, but instead they’re cheerleaders trying to convince you that this economic system is sound and reasonable through obscure math. Thus why there are also business schools that actually do attempt to work out accurate predictions, if on a smaller scale. Anyway economics exist strictly as phenomena.
On a mechanical level, capitalism has turned social science into counting. You just count stuff and the more stuff you count, the more science it is. It has no real philosophical underpinning that makes it science. It’s just stats on a specific topic. Nothing wrong with stats, but science has to be more than that.
A good example is studies of human nature. You inevitably find out that they didn’t actually study all humans, just an incredibly small sample of Americans around the university. How sloppy is that? When you press them long enough they claim they don’t have the funding or time to study every group. So the fact that we have an economy where studies are part of this psuedo-market system of grant competition makes it not science. Because science has to go places that aren’t profitable or may require decades of funding and effort. They realize this and that’s why they love aggregate studies. They love to just take what other people in other places did and somehow that makes it better. But it doesn’t really. You can’t study a small group of humans under a specific mode of production and make assumptions about all of human nature. It’s not science. You can’t ask those questions though because now you’re getting into philosophy which is liberal, humanities nonsense according to these people.
