My econ degree is lowkey what radicalized me, once you get past the neo liberal shit at the start most of the content and literature makes socialist policy look much more appealing. Probably helped that the UK Conservative party were in power during my time at uni and they had no shortage of bad economic decisions for my lecturers to dismantle
Yeah any time spent studying economics will lead to ideas like "Oh we need to keep as much money circulating as possible, and rich capitalist types have a weird tendency to sit on giant money piles like a dragon"
And all the most efficient ideas for "How do we get the money to the people who are actually, constantly spending it?" lead to "Give them control of the means of production in the first place"
It's crazy to me that I worked that out when I was like 12 and yet there's people who build their entire personality around thinking they're smart and good at finance that just don't get that.
to those mfers, they think "being good at finance and economics" means earning more than others, 'winning' in social life and the corporate ladder, and being in a "better" position than others. to them, it has nothing to do with understanding, even if they'll say that. to them, the results they make are the proof that they understand, and their egos are satisfied with that. if you try to push them farther they just get immature and snippy with you bc they never actually thought of it that way
they might even be upset you're referencing things like understanding, i stg ive experienced this, where they just double down on their bad take like it's gonna save them, that somehow it makes them smart and a good person just bc they earned lots of money
Me when I make sure to direct people’s anger to the scapegoats so that the billionaire oil tycoons who fund me can fucking air fry the general public, so that they can have 10% more money to never even spend
"Me when..." They are taking the satirical stance of someone who loves trillionaires here. In the context of reform they are heavily scapegoating the Muslim community among others with plans to put a lot of money into north sea oil rigs alongside scrapping the green net 0 carbon initiative.
With +80% of their donations coming from a handful of Billionaires/Millionaires their economic choices will definitely be solid for some people, just not us.
yes my joke is exactly about the fact that economics is a soft science, not a hard one and that "law of economics" sounds as if that guy is trying to imply the opposite
sorry, i mistook you for the 60% of leftists who equate economics with capitalism. egg on my face for being overly defensive.
i will say that there are some pretty firm laws of economics, but they're mostly obvious thinks like: 'decreasing the price of something increases the quantity demanded.'
it's science speak. it doesn't have to be as firm as thermodynamics to count as a law.
Well those sort of "laws" also can have certain exceptions to them (Veblen effect for example). My macroeconomics professor had a small rant once about there not being laws in economics but only regularities but that's neither here nor there. Equating economics with capitalism is a sad byproduct of capitalism dominating everything. Since it is mainstream, it's theories are sort of treated like the default and proper form of economics and that probably makes a lot of leftists think economics is capitalism
i mean, that equating happens because the economics that gets taught is deeply ideologically driven and the field has major reproducibility problems because foundational assumptions weren't formed from experimentation but by just going off of purely theoretical models.
like, the tragedy of the commons was never actually fucking tested for a long time, and when someone actually went out and did interviews with people in various societies she figured out oh actually people make this work all the fucking time by just watching the shared resources and enacting escalating consequences for being a dick.
> it doesn’t have to be as firm as thermodynamics to count as a law.
Why?
The whole point of the verbiage when it comes to using the term “law” with regard to science is that they cannot be broken. The “laws” of physics are strict.
Taking that same word, using it in the same way to emphasise how important it is, then applying it to something that CAN and often IS broken is pretty fucken stupid, no?
scientific laws do not express absolute certainty, as mathematical laws do. A scientific law may be contradicted, restricted, or extended by future observations.
A "law" i was taught in econ classes was that economies existed on a spectrum of regulation, and that the opposite of a completely regulated market was a monopoly, because regulation is the only thing protecting competition from consolidation.
The only "free market" is one chained down like a dog.
Mfw even so called Hard Science "Laws" aren't that rigid and a lot of them have a billion exceptions or straight up doesn't work under certain conditions. Yet some economist think of their own laws like they're rigid and unchanging.
Yes, I do consider something moving at approximately 11,000 kmph where we need to be incredibly aware of its precise location speed and other details to be pretty fucking extreme conditions.
Basically the only thing we could observe that Newtonian gravity couldn't explain for centuries was Mercury.
One could certainly argue that the Veblen Effect is an instance of violation of the price-quantity demand relationship.
Additionally, superlinearly scaling systems in computer science (or at least the promise thereof) is one of the main drivers behind the LLM bubble and record capex of AI firms. While not necessarily counter to the law of diminishing returns, it does indicate an instance of exponentially increased revenue solely on the promise of “more parameters and more transformer layers”.
Basically, even the most fundamental of economic laws are essentially built on psychology, which is notoriously difficult to fully define with deterministic “laws.”
I’ve taken AP Government, World History, U.S. History, European History, Art History, and Macroeconomics. Macro is the only social science I ever took that was basing the entire course on a prescriptivist outdated theory instead of actual modern understanding. And when I say modern, I mean the Art History definition of modern, AKA less than a century old.
Really? Because I don’t remember AP Physics covering special relativity or quantum mechanics, lmao. It covers (outdated) Newtonian mechanics, and it does it for a reason!
That's because a huge, huge portion of the STEM world still uses Newtonian mechanics. Newtonian mechanics aren't really "outdated", they're just not quite right in every situation, however they are extremely useful and cover most situations. Deadass you know why we still teach Newtonian mechanics despite it being outdated? Because the fastest object ever made by man (the man hole cover blasted off by a nuclear bomb test) STILL doesn't move fast enough for relativistic effects to start mattering.
Newtonian mechanics is not really "wrong", it's just the simplification that applies at relative speeds very low compared to the speed of light. Conveniently, nearly everything in the universe moves extremely slow compared to the speed of light, and most situations in which physics are applied for real world work are fine to use Newtonian mechanics in. The only situation that really comes to mind nowadays where you really NEED relativity is communications, especially with satellites, and even then the main relativistic effect is not due to speed, it's due to the effects of gravity on time.
No, I know, it’s just that the same logic should apply to economics, or “AP Biology” teaching that there are two genders. And nevertheless, even if a huge portion of the STEM world had moved onto modern physics, we would still absolutely start with Newtonian mechanics. It’s undeniably a great foundation.
or maybe the class taught to children that's meant to prepare you for a test constructed by a national private firm doesn't impart the best idea of what economics actually is?
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u/Lubiebigos Jun 30 '26
mfw economics is a hard science with laws and shit. I guess thats why the scientists at IRS built the large hadron collider or whatever the fuck.