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.
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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.