reminder that neolibs advocate keeping unemployment up on purpose to suppress wages and contrive a reserve army of labor who will scab out of desperation in the event of unionization drives
When I was in high school and taking an economics class, my teacher explained it to us that very low unemployment is a bad thing that only happens in bad places
When I asked how forcing some people out of the labor market to artificially keep wages low is any different than laws mandating price ceilings or rent control in terms of fucking with the free market, you could see the gears grinding to a halt in his head
My econ 101 teacher showed us a short film titled “Rent control”. It depicted a landlord murdering his tenants after collecting a key deposit. It was implied that rent control was the problem.
Wilder than actually being made to watch that was the fact that some econ students had made that for a project.
Neoliberal ideology doesn’t advocate for a complete free market without any state intervention, that’s the oldest Classical Liberal ideology. Neoliberal ideology allows the bourgeois state to meddle in the market as long as it does it on behalf of the bourgeoise.
Hence artificially suppressing inflation is fine. Propping up banks and corporations and socializing their losses is fine. Artificially increasing unemployment is fine.
I mean in truth neoliberal is just an ideological front for class warfare in practice.
But ideologically neoliberalism very much does conceive of itself as a return to late 19th century “classical liberal” principles. Its just that they constantly violate their own so-called principles routinely because their ideology is dumb and wrong and fails constantly. But they pretend the logic is sound every time.
Which is bad policy, but… like… how do you have a proven effective casual relationship between interest rates and unemployment, unemployment and wages/union membership and then implement a policy that exploits this relationship consistently and effectively
And after all this insist “Economics isn’t a science”.
The fact that you can talk to any two economists during any point in time and have them disagree with one another about why things are going well or even if things are going well is a solid attestation as to how much of capitalist economics is a bullshit guessing game with roughly 5,000 variables (some of which are MUCH more significant than others)
Is inflation up due to overemployment? Or due to economic sanctions? Or due to rising income and wealth growth?
Or is it maybe just due to corporations leveraging a crises into an excuse to price jack?
roughly 5,000 variables (some of which are MUCH more significant than others)
Hey, not fair. They said “ceteris paribus.”
. . .
Something @discountsocialism said in a Ukraine thread:
It’s so impossible to predict a recession that there is an entire field of economics called nowcasting which tries to predict if we’re currently in a recession with poor results. If they can’t do that then they certainly can’t forecast into the future.
didn’t you look at the chart? It’s pretty clear that inflation is due to low unemployment.
Also, how complicated could economics be? It breaks down to a number of inviolate causative relationships/laws like “supply & demand” and apparently “inflation/unemployment”
People who unironically parrot those comments always seem to forget that, while economic theory is to happen in an isolated, frictionless vacuum in much the same manner as beginning physics, capitalist economics does not care about how things play out in isolated, impossibly simple conditions (also much like physics)
Also economics doesn’t even have strong theoretical nor evidentiary grounding in those idealized conditions. In physics you can declare a frictionless vacuum, then create further experiments for wind resistance and friction to show how they operate and change the results - and how trends predicted through the simple models still hold.
In economics, most of the time it’s 35 friction models all at once and the economist goes in and says, “when I look at it from this angle, I see a direct relationship between these two variables”, the :capitalist-laugh: celebrate it and give the economist a wing at a university and a think tank, and it is now canonized science.
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.
Who would have thought “scientific” institutions that only rich people can attend to would validate rich people’s interests as Good and Very Sciency
Economics is just astrology for men
