But my real education in economics was as a small child in Chicago in the late 1930s, witnessing effects of the very real national depression –the depression to end all depressions. There were signs of it’s effects every around the city, in an era when much of the viable employment was in federally controlled public works projects such as those of the WPA (Works Progress Administration). The coming of World War II in September 1939 was the main factor that ended the Great Depression.

Now, late in my life, I see signs that we may be in yet another Great Depression. But this time, there is no world war on the horizon. And even if there were such a phenomenon, the USA would not be mobilizing 50-100 thousand large and small factories to turn us into a 21st century “arsenal of democracy”, and they would not be enlisting or conscripting another 16 million young american men and women into the uniformed armed forces.

So this Great Depression II — if it turns out that way — may be around for a long time. And when world oil production begins its terminal peak some time between 2012 and 2018, as predicted by a number of petroleum geologists and energy industry economics, our economy and that of the rest of the developed world will be in deep shit without toilet paper.

Arnold Harris
Mount Horeb WI

You’re painting too broad a brush on economics is all I’m saying, Sean. You had one or two entry-level classes. Unless your teacher had a PhD in economics, you can’t really be sure you just didn’t have someone with a Master’s degree in some related field. You might have also just gotten an idiot with a PhD–there are a depressing number out there.

One of the things I hated so much about the college experience (I graduated, but barely alive, I hated every fucking second of all four+ miserable years. But I disgress.) was teachers who thought that being “right” was more important than making sure students had the straight dope with no bullshit.

One of the things I noticed was how often teachers would get things wrong in college. You can, I suppose, infer from that that I’m so arrogant I just always argue with teachers. There’s no way I can prove or disprove that; obviously no one is entirely objective about themselves. Yet I rarely got into fights with my teachers, only once got into any serious disagreement about any academic matter (and maybe a few other arguments over a grade here or there). Mostly I made it my habit of quietly raising objections but if the teacher would have none of it I’d just shut up; I was there to get the stupid piece of paper, not argue with teachers.

More than once on a matter, I was able to quietly send a polite email to a teacher where I thought they’d made a mistake in class. Sometimes they blew me off, sometimes they made lame excuses which indicated to me that they were too proud to just say “whoops, you’re right, I blew that one didn’t I?” (we all do these things, I trust a teacher more who says that than any teacher who fulminates about how much more knowledgeable they are than me). Most of the time, the teachers were for real and would just do the right thing and say, “you know, you’re right.” Or, even better: “you know, I can see where you’re coming from, but here’s what I think you might be missing.”

I think if your Econ teacher were smarter, he’d have just said, “hmm, come grab me after class and let’s discuss this, you may have an interesting point there but I need to think about it and we need to get through this lesson.”

Good teachers do that.

So, rambling on: don’t read too much into one teacher’s foolishness. Heck, he may have even just been having a bad day and didn’t realize he was spouting babble even though he was. ;-)

My problem with economics is not whether they call it a “science” or not. Heck they call Psychology a “science.” Insofar as “science” means “applying the scientific method” then dog training can be a “science.”

My problem with economics is that they twist mathematics around to make it fit their preconceived notions and then teach it to impressionable kids as if their suppositions were “proven” in the pure mathematical sense. Since most students seem to assume the instructor and textbook are TRUE, this bothers me.

It does not require calculus to be a science. But if you are going to INVOKE calculus in an attempt to provide CREDIBILITY for your “science” then it strikes me as completely dishonest to not apply mathematics rigorously according to mathematical rules.

That’s my gripe. And it’s not restricted to economics. I think this is rampant in all the politicalized “sciences” from economics to global warming.

The same is true of the social sciences; when we can quantify certain things about a large population–and I don’t think most people who’ve really looked at it would disagree–then you’ve got something solid there.

There is much in economics that’s proven wildly successful. We can quantify all sorts of things by looking at a nation’s GDP, PPP, and quite a lot of other things that economists gave us.

Every science also has bleeding edges where nobody quite understands what’s going on. Einstein’s theories are incomplete (if not outright wrong) in some important areas. Biologists still don’t have a full handle on what drives evolution besides natural selection and random mutation (although some will burst into mouth-foaming fury if you say that–I know, it’s happened to me a few times). There are still physicists who think much of quantum theory is illusory. Astronomers and cosmologists still have only a dim understanding of certain objects. And so on.

So while I think it’s fair to criticize any of the social sciences as having certain innate problems, that doesn’t make social science Not Science. At least, not if you ask me. ;-)

I raised my hand and pointed out that an integral over a discontinuity in a function was, by definition, undefined, and as such the result was no better than a wild guess.

The professor insisted that the result was valid because the discontinuity “was not important.”

I told the class, “I don’t care what you guys do with this information, but you need to know that what this class is doing is misrepresenting itself as a “science” when it is refusing to adhere to the rigor that defines “science” itself. You need to know that this “proof” is nothing more than speculation on the part of the economists who have derived this equation.”

I still made a “B” in the class.

On the microeconomic level — which ironically tends to be less quantitative — the predictive power of economic theory is, I think, pretty good. But it seems that when it comes to comprehending large economies or even sectors of them, it’s a lot weaker. If the reason is that there are too many variables for the darned thing to work, then maybe someday it will work because we’ll figure out how to stuff all the data into it.

But it’s equally possible that economics is not really a science at all but a paradigm of analysis that uses statistical tools to quantify behavior and tries to apply that to what are fundamentally sociological, psychological or other phenomena not really amenable to the sort of predictive certainty we expect of a science at all.

Then there’ some third possibility, you’d think. I don’t know that it would be. Assume a can opener.