"People are shockingly ignorant about economics."
Good. People are shockingly ignorant about phrenology and evopsych too. As they should be. Let's hope someday economics is treated like the pseudoscience it is. A footnote in the sociology texts.
@matt hell yeah. Modern econ is basically just capitalist ideology with barely any actual science.
Thats bit harsh. I can't see why economics and evolutionary psychology that tests its theories with experiments that can be repeated and adjusts its theories accordingly is any less scientific than medicine that uses such methods.
I have a disabled brother, and his disability was blamed on parenting, until genetic sciences developed and showed it was genetic. Same thing with lot of parents of schizophrenic children.
Free market bias exists, but doesn't make it a pseudoscience.
@LeoSammallahti Genes are a real, observable thing that exists in nature. Money is something humans invented.
@matt @LeoSammallahti Economics isn't really about money, it's about distribution of resources. It's independent of any particular economic system (such as capitalism). It's true that economics often studies capitalist systems, but that's only because we live in a capitalist world, and it's much harder to study a system with no real-world implementation.
@LeoSammallahti @matt Oh and I forgot to mention: economics is also not juxtaposed to sociology, and often takes cues from sociology where appropriate.
@matt
Would like economics and social sciences to go into a direction similar to medicine, with random allocation of test participants to different interventions.
Example of such economics study:
"Adding a picture of the offending vehicle in the letters sent to non-payers of Vehicle Excise Duty increased the payment rates from 40% to 49% compared to those who didn't receive a picture in the letter."
Too often social science theories are too vague to be tested and falsified/proven.