nov 28, 2011 

didn't i say something about this yesterday? solipsism alert...

i've rambled about this before, but not here. the major flaw in modern economics - and, yes, i started with mankiw's horrendous text - is that it repeatedly assigns causal relations based on theory rather than experiment. to call that flunkie science would be being nice.

those nice little graphs where you take an intersection point back and forth are mostly complete nonsense from a scientific perspective because there aren't studies to back them up, just supposedly pristine logic.

a perfect example of the flawed causal relations is the idea that cutting taxes increases jobs. i'm not the first person that's pointed this out, but maybe it's less realized that the discipline routinely produces arguments that are equally causally terrible. and, it's as a causal relation that these things are presented, as though there's some physical force in the universe that is as powerful as any magnetic force that demands that one necessarily leads to the other.

in reality, it's a bad argument based on utopian caricatures of human nature. in fact, dozens of the causal relations presented are....

it's admittedly hard to do experiments in economics. but, data is slowly building. and, when it does, the unsettling conclusion is going to be that they don't even have correlation, let alone causality.

our system of economics is really in an incredibly primitive aristotlian stage of philosophy. we need a newton to reform the system into a science, and then an einstein to actually understand it.
  
http://www.adbusters.org/magazine/98/new-spirit-economics.html