The study of economics has been searching for respectability for many decades. Most recently it has been mathematized in order to make it more sciency and references to the “economic sciences” (sic) abound.
I noticed that today the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences had been awarded, and as a lazy news agencies reported it, it was the Nobel Prize for Economics. There is no Nobel Prize for Economics. This prize was named to imply that it is but it is not. They even announce the “winners” at the same time the real Nobel Prizes are awarded to complete the illusion. Pathetic. Almost as bad as the award shows, like the Oscars, et. al. in which an industry rewards itself.
No matter how much respectability grubbing proponents of the study of economics claim it is, economics is not a science. Yes, math can be used, graduate courses in economics now require Calculus where they did not in the recent past, and money can be calculated to fine precision, but the “laws” governing the topic aren’t scientific laws and, in most cases are little better than conjectures.
Take, for example, the concept of market equilibrium. A market is said to be at equilibrium when supply and demand for a good or service balance each other, and as a result prices become stable. If something changes this situation, once breached, the market opposes these changes, moving back in the direction of equilibrium. It is a nice concept and, as a rule of thumb, is a description of a small part of the behaviors one can observe in economic markets. But it is not a scientific law. There are no natural forces behind it. The major users of economics, businesses, are striving fang and claw to create monopolies for their businesses, so that have complete and total control of their market. There is no “market force” or “economic force” that opposes these attempts at “market domination.” Such “economic laws” (sic) are just crude descriptions of how markets can perform under a small set of circumstances.
The whole idea of free markets was built upon the myth of market correction forces. The myth is that politicians should leave markets alone because markets function best when unregulated. This is a baseless, self-serving claim that is not supported by any facts. Those promoting free markets, that is markets free from government regulation, really want governments not interfering with their market manipulations. They want to be the regulator of their markets, not the representative of all of the people, governments.
There is no such thing as a “free” market, which is a good thing because markets do not work without some regulation. Consider pharmaceuticals. Would you want to have a market for pharmaceuticals that was completely free, meaning that anyone could claim anything as an outcome of taking their medicinals and, well, anything goes? No FDA interference? No requirements for effectiveness interference? We have had a glimpse of what this would be like when in 1994, Congress removed “herbal supplements” from the purview of the FDA. What we got were herbal concoctions claimed to cure everything from the common cold to cancer with no requirement that such claims be proven in clinical or any other studies.
An Aside—I have a method of determining when a “herbal supplement” is bogus. If you are temped to try the XYZ herbal supplement, do an Internet search along the lines of “does XYZ really work?” If the first ten websites you find are websites that are bogus, set up by the purveyor of the supplement, you know it is bogus. The practice for such bogus supplements is to put up a dozen or two websites seemingly independently studying your product, but usually just having long lists of testimonials, from people like Tom T. from Philadelphia, or Theresa W. from Portland, Oregon. None of these people can be contacted for verification because not enough information was been supplied, but that would be a waste of your time because they and their commendations are fictional. These website dilute out any honest evaluations of the XYZ supplement.
If you see such sites listed at the top of your search, well, now you know.
Does anyone want “anything goes” markets? I don’t think so. The “free market” bandwagon is just a vehicle to oppose government regulation that protects citizens from phony claims and phony products. Like a dog chasing cars, if it actually caught one it wouldn’t know what to do with it. Any economist who touts the virtues of free markets is a charlatan. Some economists don’t even know they are charlatans. Every course in economics they took in college had the same nonsensical presuppositions built in and then quick raced past to play with more “advanced” topics. Never to the go back and check their original suppositions.
Then they take their suppositions and double down on then, an example of which is Walras’s “law” which says that excess supply in one market must be matched by excess demand in another, so that in the larger picture there will be a general equilibrium. Can any causal connection be made between the demand in one market and the supply in another? I don’t think so. But the concept of “equilibrium” has run away with these person’s common sense. In the physical sciences, a system can only be in a state of equilibrium if it is isolated completely from the rest of the universe, excluding all other matter, energies, forces, etc. As a consequence a system in physical equilibrium is detached from the rest of the universe and has no effect on it or it on the system.
Now, there are systems that are near equilibrium all over the place in nature and those systems show some of the behaviors of equilibrium systems, for one they oppose changes in the distribution of matter and energy in the system, but those near-equilibrium systems are limited in such responses and can always be shoved off of the tracks, so to speak. Economic systems are somewhat like physical near-equilibrium systems but only under very constrained circumstances.
The key point is if you want them to behave as if they were near-equilibrium systems, you would have to regulate the situations they apply to. Certain “market stimulations” would be forbidden, etc. If you want an example of this look at the U.S. stock markets. The “players” in the markets for stocks invent ways to manipulate the markets in their favor on almost a daily basis. The markets, though, are heavily regulated (there are hundreds of pages of regulations adopted by each market) and most of these manipulative practices never get implemented. But every once in a while corrupt players get some control and you end up with high priced worthless “financial instruments” that crash the system, sometimes worldwide, like what happened in 2008. And these morons still preach “regulation is bad!”
I think economists should be required to dress for their profession, witch doctor garb would be appropriate.
Uncommon Sense 
Humanity’s Achilles’ Heel: Absolutism
Tags: politics, religion
The term “absolutism” tends to be hijacked by political scientists who reserve the word for political systems with an absolute monarch or other absolute entity at the top. But the word has a broader definition, still standing for a belief in and support of absolute positions.
Humans are “all or nothing” believers. Other people are either “bad” or “good,” there is no nuanced position. Obviously everyone has their good and bad points, even Hitler did. But as absolutists, we don’t want to acknowledge Hitler’s good points, we want him to be “all bad.”
And our god cannot be just really, really powerful but all-powerful and not just the creator of the Earth, but the creator of a universe consisting of many trillions of galaxies. Sheesh.
This tendency toward absolutes is often ascribed to our unwillingness to embrace ambiguity and complexity, but I find that argument unsatisfactory. Listen to any sports nut talk about the statistics of their sport or, better, the odds of sports bets now open to them. Baseball Sabermetricians give the lie to this idea. Afraid of complexity, no way!
It seems to me that women are often obsessed with family dynamics. They keep track of every family member’s relationships and have stories to tell about all of them. Men’s eyes tend to glaze over when they get into details but not because of an avoidance of complexity, but from a lack of interest. Similarly when men get into the details of a construction project, women tend to drift away, again from a lack of interest, not because they cannot handle complexity.
Our being wedded to absolutes may be an outcome of our social behavior. Because we are a social species, we interact with members of our social families and on occasion are asked to contribute to decisions. When one approaches such discussions with nuanced positions, one sounds wishy-washy. When one has a firm, simple position, people sound convicted and more truthful. In our current political environment I hear things like “Joe Biden is evil” and “Democrats want to destroy Christianity.” In our current religious environment I hear “atheists are evil” quite a bit. All of this stems from pushes to the extreme to make an absolutist argument. But once you get to such an absolutist position, there is almost no road back, away from that position. This is why Christians insist that Christians who become atheists must not have been “True Christians™.” In their minds, once you get to that absolute position: “He is a Christian and he is saved,” it is impossible in their minds that he could move away from those positions. So, religiously and politically, the discourse is pushing, pushing people to these absolutist positions. (Insisting “You can’t be a Christian and vote Democrat” . . . even though the majority of Democrat voters are Christians.)
And since we are all absolutists, it is oh so easy for us to move that way. Unscrupulous people use lies and deceit to achieve their goals because they are absolutely convinced the ends justify the means. There is even a meme in circulation: “Liars for Jesus,” which tags people who just make stuff up and pass on known lies to push people where they want them to go.
So, the only end point to this progression is two groups of people in opposite corners of a room with a freshly painted floor in between, and no doors out. The only way to resolve such extreme positions is to fight it out and there are already many, many calls for having a civil war. (Hey, gang, I have an idea! Let’s put on a war!)
Of course, the call for another civil war is yet another absolutist position. Do those calling for such a war feel that the last civil war really cleared the air and resolved all of the problems that caused it in the first place? I wonder.
And of course, organized religion has prepared the fields of discourse by training people to believe in absolute absurdities.