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Why don’t we treat laissez-faire capitalism like global warming?
SmarterThanYou
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Several academic studies have found that there is a link between education levels and civic behavior. But a new study from the Federal Reserve Bank of New York has concluded that how much economics people study can influence their political activity and how they spend their spare time.
The study compared the behavior of economics majors with those of business majors and other graduates of four large public universities — Purdue University, the University of North Carolina, Florida Atlantic University and the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. The subjects attended those schools in one of three years: 1976, 1986 or 1996.
Most notably, the study found that the more economics classes a person took, the more likely he or she was to be a member of the Republican Party and to donate money to a political candidate or a cause.
But students of economics were no more or less likely than other graduates to have voted in the 2000 presidential election, the study found. Business majors, on the other hand, were less likely than other former students to have voted for president in 2000 or to have volunteered their time for a cause, political or otherwise.
The authors of the study — Sam Allgood, William Bosshardt, Wilbert van der Klaauw and Michael Watts — said they could not say
if those in different majors perceive the costs (value of time) or the benefits of these activities differently. But our results clearly suggest there is more to the story than simply “being educated” — so that what people study in college, or what they choose to study, is associated with their civic behaviors many years after they graduate.
The study also gathered responses to seven questions about public policy issues, such as tariffs, trade deficits, the minimum wage and oil prices. On five of the seven, the authors found a link between the opinions expressed and the number of economics courses the respondents had completed.
The more economics courses they had completed, the more likely they were to agree that tariffs reduce economic welfare and that increases in the minimum wage raise unemployment, and the less likely they were to think that trade deficits adversely affect the economy and that government should regulate oil prices.
“In sum,” the study said, “those taking more economics classes favored less regulation or government intervention affecting prices for specific goods and services, including wages and salaries.”
Now ,according to leftists, the global warming thing is true because "most climatologist believe so"
But now most economists support free-trade economics and more "liberal" you are more likely you don't understand what the science of economics have to say http://www.thecitywire.com/node/10532#.Uh9AAtKuyjd
another study(http://www.yaliberty.org/posts/study-finds-libertarians-more-cerebral-than-liberals-or-conservatives) proves that libertarians are generally more "cerebral" than liberal and leftist aka libertarianism=logic leftism=emotion
Why leftists don't accord the same level of deference to economists? Shouldn’t the pro-free markets, pro-freedom laissez-faire trade capitalism( In the realm of political economy, there's no question that capitalism is not only the only practical economic system, but further demonstrated to be the only moral economic system for reasons of right to private property and the only one that works according to human nature ) consensus within the field of economics be as bullet-proof as belief in global warming?
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It isn't that economists don't get accorded respect, because they do, just a different kindr
Virtually every economist who works as an economist and not as a trader or for a major bank believes otherwise. Heck here's some stuff about the sequestration. The thing is, if you're making mountains of cash you want less regulation and lower taxes in most cases. As for actual academic economic thought I'd like you to back up your claims about libertarian economic thought
- Why is income inequality good?
- Explain, with data, the link between unemployment and the top marginal tax rate?
- Explain the value of inflation in capitalism, or the reason why it is bad if it doesn't have value
I'm also going to have a hard time taking a study seriously that opens by quoting Rand, the psychopath behind objectivism
basically you are arguing that people who are successful in the real world(the finance sector) are republican/libertarians, those who need their paycheck from mommy government tend loward leftism
Because people are not equal...some are way smarter, stronger, hard-worker etc
I'm smarter than most people,I worked my ass of for my degree , while I should get the same as some welfare queen who do nothing except play xbox all day like most of those who are "poor" (but in reality most of them have an IPOD, a fridge, eat at MCdonalds,have access to free police and firefighter protection etc...basically they poor in america are the 5% by world standard)
America: 10% young unemployment rate
Spain,Italy,Greece: 40% young unemployment rate
I'm not an austrian economist but http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_classical_macroeconomics
the only psychopath here is Karl Marx....He, along with is followers(Lenin,Che Guevara,Stalin,Pol Pot,Gramsci,the Frankfurt schools, most of the university professor in the humanist classes etc) have created the ultimate system of oppression with a deal toiling of over 120millions and raising
Proven, reproven, and proven again.
There's a reason why the government busted its ass in the 1940's and 1950's to create a stable, regulated economy with a strong middle class. There's also a reason why our strong, regulated economy from the New Deal onward didn't have a huge economic collapse every 20-30 years like it did prior to the Great Depression.
Its great that you put all that work into your career (Non-condescendingly, I'm actually quite serious), but if the country you live in collapses out from underneath you because "economic freedom for a vague moralistic reasons", then your degree means fuck all.
good
now compare the political orientation of economists with the other social scientists and the deadbat fossils in the Humanities and you are going to discover:
1) Economists ,even the "left-wing" ones, are right-wing by academic standard....you would find far leftists,marxists,socialist and left-anarchist teaching sociology or philosophy but not in economics
2) Economics who operate in real world(Financial and private sector) are the most libertarian people ever while those who support Obama are those who hide in the Ivory Tower
3)Karl Marx is considered a moron by economists and business majors but a sort of Messiah in the other department....the oppose thing happen in social science and humanities where economics guru like Milton Friedman are disliked and stupid french communist post-modernist like Foucault and Derrida are took seriously with their post-structuralist,anti-capitalist,humanitarians,anti-western civilization nonsense.
That is the very definition of it, yes.
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Me unsure if claim stand up to scrutiny.
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but when it turns out that we do, suddenly it's because we're inhabitants of le Ivory Tower?
ancaps would probably beg to differ!
The notion that any movement in the direction of "less regulation" is by necessity laissez faire capitalism is clearly bullshit, given that one could prefer less regulation in any given area but still desire some regulation.
Hahaha, @ronya doesn't even need to waste more than three words compared to his usual and amazing posts.
There's so much wrong with that initial study.
- Specific data selection, why those schools?
- No mention of a random sampling
- Multiple comparisons, of course econ majors take more econ classes.
- Correlation vs causation not addressed
- Data taken over huge gaps of time, and none of them are in this century
Let 'em eat fucking pineapples!
Your rather absolute and simplistic approach to the topic does not impress this economics graduate, I'm afraid.
My economics 101A professor was a proud Marxist from a former Soviet satelite country.
In general, your wrong though. Marx is given great respect for his work outside of partisan hackery. If you don't know this it's probably because you don't know anything of the period he lived in, and what the popular thinking about economics was at the time.
1) Climate change is not accepted because "a lot of scientists believe it". There is overwhelming, palpable, solid EVIDENCE that points to it.
2)Economists are not scientists. Economy is not a science and it's time we stop treating it like such. Economy is ideologies and theories with little experiments or actual facts to back them up. The fact that more economists favor laissez faire capitalism is directly related to laissez faire capitalism being the current Ortodoxy of the economic sect as well as to the fact that most economy professors have vested interests in having the system deregulated.
3)Income inequality is not a binary thing. I'm fine with more qualified people/people with more responsibility getting more money. But the current difference between higher and lower income is OBSCENE.
4)All the investment whatchacallthem who go spouting the "but I work harder" nonsense have not worked hard a single day in their lives compared to a lot of workers who barely make a living. That myth is repulsive and downright offensive.
5)You are not smarter than most people, once you become aware of this fact everything else will come naturally.
The fact that you left out of here Germany and the Nordic countries proves that you are not as smart as you may think.
I truly hope you are trolling. Seriously.
It's not dogma, but lacks any sort of hard evidence. You can make predictions, and test them, and them have some other school give a different interpretation, and you have no way of knowing reality. Treating economics as anything other than the softest of sciences is foolish.
Economists often forget to take into account countless variables, make huge assumptions, oversimplifications and general statistical bullshit. Also the interpretation of results tends to be hugely biased according to ideology.
I'm sorry, but the predictive power of economics is limited, and the soundness of its theories VERY shaky.
Which is pretty hilarious because Marx was in large part a reaction the excesses that the Gilded Age produced.
The popular economic mainstay of the Gilded Age: Laissez-Faire Economics.
All this is true, but you know, I think that a more rigorous study on the same subject would produce much the same results. Econ Journal Watch is hardly rigorous (it has a pro-Austrian, pro-libertarian slant), but you may notice that the D. Klein that cowrote that study is exactly the same D. Klein that cowrote the peer-reviewed one that I cited. On those questions that the authors selected, it is quite likely that more education in economics would have correlated with more 'enlightenment' in the survey (and, yes, that is the word the authors decided to use. EJW, people). There are many obvious objections and the authors remark sensibly as much on them; note their abstract:
Of course, if you only ask questions where the popular conventional wisdom is less libertarian than the conventional wisdom of economists, then you will find that the conventional wisdom of economists is more libertarian than that of the general public.
Likewise, if you argue that:
then this becomes a survey over what the popular wisdom thinks is the relevant policy space, and what economists think it is. Naturally, for the layman, the relevant heuristic should be over what restrictions are actually plausible. For economists, it is we who are frequently called upon to decide what is plausible. So our policy space is naturally larger to begin with. It is the economist who meditates on what would happen if the minimum wage is $20; for the layman, and representatives of the layman, it is not going to be $20 and they are not going to be realistically consulted on whether it should be $20.
Where is economics reliably more interventionist than the layman? Macroeconomics and environmental econ, naturally. But you may notice that none of the eight (lol) questions chosen included either of those issues.
If co2 emissions rose and then the planet got a lot cooler we would abandon it, just like when we had 20 years of deregulation and a huge economic downturn we should abandon deregulation.
For example, and sorry for pestering you with two quotes. @SmarterThanYou claims that, since Spain, Greece and Italy have higher taxes and higher youth unemployment rate than the US, taxes bring youth unemployment. He fails to take into account other variables that may affect the countries, such as the level of institutionalized corruption and fails to mention other countries with higher taxes than the ones he mentioned but significantly lower youth unemployment.
It's not always that blatant, but it serves as a perfect example of your typical economical argument.
This is the equivalent of looking at "creationism" and saying,
"well we can't know anything about evolution, geology, paleontology, etc... because whatever our findings and studies say, someone will just come out with a different interpretation."
If your scientists start offering alternative explanations ex-post facto and have to create entirely new frameworks to view the result of your studies to justify their position, it's quite clear that they are wrong. If one scientist predicts that something will happen, and another scientists predicts the opposite, when something happens it should be quite clear who was on the money and why. Especially when we have economic data to look at and we can use to compare the models.
In other news today, a bill promoting vegetarianism has once again failed in the parliament of the wolves.
What your essentially saying here is that some people can make arguments in bad faith and support them with clearly biased evidence. This is possible in any field of science, and has been particularly common in paleontology. It's why we have peer review.
The EJW paper is the second one cited in the OP. The first one is this. It seems rigorous enough, in the sense that its conclusion was rather different than what the OP makes of it. The main argument was mainly that the number of classes has a significant impact, and should therefore be included in regressions (in the way that SES and educational attainment and so forth typically are). The sample itself was not representative - it was majority Republican to begin with, for instance.
No, I'm sorry but there is no similarity whatsoever. There is overwhelming proof that animals change over time, you may disagree on the specifics of how, when and how fast they change. But evolution is a fact.
Economics, on the other hand, tends to be a bunch of "perfect world" scenarios that are based on few facts. Starting with such basic stuff as supply and demand.
How is deregulation working out? Are the "rational actors" acting rationally or are we seeing widespread bullshitting and gaming of the system?
How is trickle-down working out? Is making the rich richer making the poor richer too?
I'm sorry but I don't understand how a system that makes predictions that turn out to be blatantly wrong and yet sticks to the same models defending them to death be called a "science".
Perhaps it could be POTENTIALLY a science some day, when economists start acting with a modicum of objectivity.
And how is peer review and conflict of interest handled in economics?
The more impact a science has on society, and especially monetary and power interests, the harder it is to honestly talk about its ideas, because people will fight hard if you try to make something they disagree with politically, ideology or religiously into a 'scientific fact' (Such a thing doesn't exist technically, but there are a lot of statements that are close), and then you get into a shouting war. Environmental studies and pharmacy certainly suffer a lot of the same flaws.
"Deregulation" is a single, uh, thing that can and should be considered as such?
If it was pointed out that some regulation essentially serves only to raise costs of new entrants to a trade, to the benefit of incumbent business interests and to the detriment of everyone else, it's not reasonable to suggest deregulating them because of this very general concept of deregulation that you have and a huge economic downturn?
I disagree and I think that maybe you're not producing reasonable opinions.
So a policy of deregulating markets has nothing to do with economic models?
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Yes he is, this is on of those copy paste trolls, stick the title into google and you'll see ancient threads on it scattered around the Internets.
I mean, I suspect he believes his bullshit rather than being a proper troll but it's what passes for trolling in theses barbarous times.
I made a game, it has penguins in it. It's pay what you like on Gumroad.
Currently Ebaying Nothing at all but I might do in the future.
They are aspects to economics.
Trickle-down/Supply side/Deregulated/Whatever economics are his dream thing. Disproving his knowledge of economics is one thing, and I suppose by showing he knows little on the subject would show why his parading of 'Murican 'Nomics is terribad by transitive property.
It's also good to show we have mountains of data and hundreds of years of examples of Lasseiz Faire economics failing, to further drive home the point.
I did not say that. I said that they were not the same thing. A policy of adding particular regulations can be the recommendation of a given model, just as a policy of removing particular regulations can be.
What a well thought out answer!
Actually no, it's not even an answer...
So your assertion is that the United States unemployment rate for the last 53 years must have been highest in 1960 and lowest in the late 80s or 2002-2010? Or is it that you believe growth benefits substantially from ultra low taxes, indicating that growth would be higher now than in say the 1990s?
Is it possible that tax rates have very little to do with the health of the economy?
Yes, so if a group of economists were to come up with a model that suggests that the addition or removal of regulations would be the best thing to achieve X, and they were listened to, regulation or deregulation would come through the acceptance of a certain economic model as true. That is all I am talking about. Economic policy may not be economic theory itself, but it's a consequence of it.
yeah there isn't really much of a point to be made I mean
The United States had laissez faire capitalism, in the post civil war period in America we were on the gold standard and had very little regulation and it was awful