I did not always think that mainstream economists are mostly socialized to be unlettered knaves, deficient in mathematics and logic. It took decades of empirical evidence.
These links are mostly to tedious and petty stuff, more for my own archiving. Lots of weird stuff comes from non-economists. Sometimes you will find a poster not necessarily defending me, but trying to get some other poster to say something substantial. Some, like Tim Lambert, do not even seem to care about economics. The misrepresentations by mainstream economists of what they and others say is not confined to discussions with me. Some serious people, like David Graeber, appear in these discussions independent of me.
- Poor teaching of econ (August 2007)
- Failure of neoclassical economics (January, 2006).
- Baumol, Kolakowski, Schumpeter: Bohm Bawerk Mistaken (November 2005).
- Bush tax cut and small businesses (October 2004).
- Edward Prescott, Idiot (October 2004).
- No Mainstream Economist Will Acknowledge Here Math In This Post Is Correct (July 2004).
- Calculation of GDP, Productivity (December 2003).
- Death Rattle Of Neoclassical Theory Of Value (September 2003)
- The economics of free choice (August 2003)
- John Lott (June 2003).
- Reminder: Wages, Employment Not Determined By Supply, Demand (May 2003).
- Some comments on Robert Vienneau's LTV document (April 2003). My FAQ on the LTV.
- Smith And Hegel Agree. Stigler A Hack? (February 2003).
- A Sraffian Interpretation Of Marx (January 2003). My essay.
- Liebowitz Unchained (November 2002).
- Wages, Employment Still Not Determined By Supply And Demand (October 2002).
- Wages, employment not determined by supply, demand (April 2002).
- Debunking Debunking Economics (March 2002).
- Neoclassical Economics Decomposing (March 2002).
- David Landes (February 2002).
- Film criticism at Notre Dame (February 2002).
- Debunking Vienneau (January 2002).
- Paradocs (July 2001).
- Is Boulder Dam capital? (December 2000)
- Response to Scott Moss (March 2000).
- Do Factor Markets Exist? (November 1998).
- LTV FAQ (Part 1 of 6) (November 1998).
- Reswitching and the Cambridge Capital Controversy (October 1998).
I think twitter shows that many with training in economics, science, or mathematics realize that "Mainstream economics is replete with ideas that 'everyone knows' to be true, but that are actually arrant nonsense" (Jeremy Rudd). Maybe I had a small part in this realization.
Update 12 July 2022: Added a link.
Posts
6 comments:
Some nostalgia to the sci.econ threads, although I had pretty much tuned out of USENET by 1999.
I recall being convinced by the fights you got into on sci.econ in the mid 1990s that you were more likely to be right than the mainstream just by reflection on the nature of the mathematics you preferred: you tried to couch your arguments in the language of linear algebra where possible, the area of mathematics that is most transparent, while marginalism seems to demand unlikely abstractions, where few particpants seemed to have an appreciation for the puzzles involving the infinite and continua that drove the modern treatment of the mathematics that mainstream economics relies on.
I also recall you being insulted for using weird and obscure mathematics.
I do not recommend that anybody extensively read these threads.
I find it difficult to search Usenet with Google. I tried to pick threads where I had something substantial to say. I thought I often came off more rude than I can see in these threads.
I recall some telling me that nobody uses linear programming. I know, Charles, that you know more about philosophical debates on the foundations of mathematics than I do.
«realize that "Mainstream economics is replete with ideas that 'everyone knows' to be true, but that are actually arrant nonsense"»
Steve Keen's "Debunking Economics" is a good summary of the many issues and should be cited here too. I will also quote the usual:
https://rwer.wordpress.com/2013/06/30/doctor-x-pure-shit-and-the-royal-societys-motto/
«found myself sitting next to a very likable young middle-aged academic tenured at an elite British university [...] “Every year I publish papers in the top journals and they’re pure shit.” [...] Doctor X could and would like “to write serious papers but what would be the point?” [...] The amount of funding Doctor X’s department receives depends not on how many papers or their quality its members publish, but instead on in which journals they are published. The journals in Doctor X’s field in which publication results in substantial funding will not publish “serious papers” but instead only “pure shit” papers, meaning ones that merely elaborate old theories that nearly everyone knows are false. Moreover, even to publish a “serious paper” in addition to the “pure shit” ones could taint the department’s reputation, resulting in a reduction of its funding.»
«The impact [...] has been essentially zero»
How does the real world work? Emeritus prof. Wren-Lewis illustrates:
https://mainlymacro.blogspot.com/2016/09/economics-dsge-and-reality-personal.html
« I first learnt economics at Cambridge, a department which at that time was hopelessly split between different factions or ‘schools of thought’. I thought if this is what being an academic is all about I want nothing to do with it, and instead of doing a PhD went to work at the UK Treasury. The one useful thing about economics that Cambridge taught me (with some help from tutorials with Mervyn King) was that mainstream economics contained too much wisdom to be dismissed as fundamentally flawed, but also (with the help of John Eatwell) that economics of all kinds could easily be bent by ideology.
My idea that by working at the Treasury I could avoid clashes between different schools of thought was of course naive. Although the institution I joined had a well developed and empirically orientated Keynesian framework, it immediately came under attack from monetarists, and once again we had different schools using different models and talking past each other. [...]
Our bid was successful, and in the model called COMPACT I would argue we built the first UK large scale structural econometric model which was New Keynesian but which also incorporated innovative features like an influence of (exogenous) financial conditions on intertemporal consumption decisions. We deliberately avoided forecasting, but I was very pleased to work with the IPPR in providing model based economic analysis in regular articles in their new journal, many written with Rebecca Driver. Our efforts impressed the academics on the ESRC board that allocated funds, and we won another 4 years funding, and both projects were subsequently rated outstanding by academic assessors.
But the writing was on the wall for this kind of modelling in the UK, because it did not fit the ‘it has to be DSGE’ edict from the US. A third round of funding, which wanted to add more influences from the financial sector into the model using ideas based on work by Stiglitz and Greenwald, was rejected because our approach was ‘old fashioned’ i.e not DSGE. (The irony given events some 20 years later is immense, and helped inform this paper.)
As my modelling work had always been heavily theory based, I had no problem moving with the tide, and now at Exeter university with Campbell Leith we began a very successful stream of work looking at monetary and fiscal policy interactions using DSGE models. We obtained a series of ESRC grants for this work, again all subsequently rated as outstanding. Having to ensure everything was microfounded I think created more heat than light, but I learnt a great deal from this work which would prove invaluable over the last decade.
The work on exchange rates got revitalised with Gordon Brown’s 5 tests for Euro entry, and although the exchange rate with the Euro was around 1.6 at the time, the work I submitted to the Treasury implied an equilibrium rate closer to 1.4. When the work was eventually published it had fallen to around 1.4, and stayed there for some years. Yet as I note here, that work again used an ’old fashioned’ (non DSGE) framework, so it was of no interest to journals, and I never had time to translate it (something Obstfeld and Rogoff subsequently did, but ignoring all that had gone before).»
Not everybody can so easily argue that “As my modelling work had always been heavily theory based, I had no problem moving with the tide”
Thanks for the comments. It is clear that many mainstream economists think of themselves as contributing to the world. Some I even agree with politically, while objecting to their theories. Some are doing detailed technical work, some, at least, of which is not impacted by the technical issues with which I deal.
«Reswitching and the Cambridge Capital Controversy
[Robert Vienneau Oct 21, 1998, 8:00:00 AM]»
Ah so you have been going at it for nearly 24 years now, so you are one of my heroes. I am ashamed that I gave up a bit earlier than that :-), and Steve Keen is my greatest hero because:
https://www.debtdeflation.com/blogs/2014/07/23/are-the-students-revolting-or-is-it-economics/comment-page-1/
«Today I commence a new role as Head of the School of Economics, History and Politics at Kingston University, London, 41 years after my life as an economist began in 1973. That’s not when my PhD was approved, nor when I got my first academic job, but the date on which I participated in the student revolt over the teaching of economics in a dispute that led to the formation of the Department of Political Economy at Sydney University in 1975. This dispute has always been tagged with a left-wing brush. Australia’s current Prime Minister Tony Abbott, when he was President of the Students Representative Council at Sydney University in 1979, supported cutbacks to University funding on the grounds that they would force Universities to stop running courses like political economy:
Abbott: “Quite frankly I think that these courses are not only trivial, but they are attempts by unscrupulous academics to impose simplistic ideological solutions upon students, as it were to make students the cannon fodder for their own private versions of the revolution. And I think that if there were further cuts to the education budget well then we would certainly see the Universities cracking down on that sort of course. The fact that they can offer that sort of course is to me proof that there is room for further cuts.”
Interviewer: “You also suggest cutting out political economy?”
Abbott: “That’s right”
(Tony Abbott, University of New England radio interview 1979)
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VpqHBzYVPqY#t=392]
There’s no doubt that the vast majority of the activists in Political Economy Movement were left-wing. But my core motivation for taking part in that dispute was that mainstream economic theory was simply wrong. The next 40 years of reading economic literature confirmed that gut feeling. Mainstream ‘neoclassical’ economics had a multitude of flaws, all of which had been documented in the academic literature, yet almost none of them were discussed in economics textbooks. Instead, textbook authors either ignored the problems, or did the mother of all Photoshop jobs on the frankly ludicrous assumptions that were made to paper over problems in the theory, so that the flawed models could sound halfway reasonable to someone who only read the textbooks.»
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