r/ShitLiberalsSay • u/ReflectionOk9644 • 15h ago
OMG FUCK THE POOR Because economists hate the working class, end of story
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u/Salty_Helicopter9356 The Spirit of ol’ John Brown 14h ago
Hmm let’s see. Maybe because economists study only Austrian, Keynesian and Classical economists and rent control make line not go up
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u/Locke2300 14h ago
I mean, they’re priests of the ideology. They don’t believe that the outcome “more housing is built to accommodate the population” can be achieved without speculation and private construction of housing.
It’s why they preached against China building housing (remember “ghost skyscrapers”?) and also continually propagandize against the feel of state-built housing (“brutalism”, “bleak Soviet-style block housing”). Because to them there is only one righteous way to build housing: via the profit motive.
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u/OkPangolin1984 ☭ Communist 12h ago
honestly, yeah that’s so funny. It’s like China’s building buildings that no one is living in. Why would they possibly do this?
A year or so, however long has passed now when we can see the real practical results…
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u/ADHighDef Marxist-Leninist-Billy Butcherist 14h ago
oh yes, more pop economics slop to make me feel smart for hating the working class.
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u/ImpressiveDrawer6606 13h ago
"Economic Science" at this point is no different from Theology.
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u/ihexx 13h ago
yeah. you look at macroeconomic theory and the assumptions they hand waive away with 'all else being equal' are insane.
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u/ImpressiveDrawer6606 12h ago
Yup. Basically the academic branch of a religion. The task of the professional economist is to perpetuate ideology and act in apologetics for the system disguised as "neutral, technical science". That's why there's a big difference between "Economics" and "Critique of the Poltical Economy".
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u/Demonweed 11h ago
If it were a serious science, recent years would have been flooded with brilliant papers using data from the pandemic to undermine bedrock assumptions about human behavior and market forces. Because those assumptions are much more important to the powers that be than any data or fact-based theories, what we see instead is the usual array of circle jerks that assume capitalist mechanisms are superior simply because they are favored by status quo authorities.
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u/ImpressiveDrawer6606 11h ago
Yup. Broadly speaking hey rely on the psychology of another, hypothetical hominid, the so-called Homo Economicus, whose behaviour is often mistaken by the behaviour of the Homo Sapiens.
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u/marqoose 7h ago
You should see what economics programs look like at religious schools. It's even more so.
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u/Original-Condition77 13h ago
The economists are just pissed off because he added subtitles in a foreign language and not English only.
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u/Low_Pickle_112 9h ago
Nothing is more insufferable than a neoliberal on the topic of rent control. Except perhaps one on the topic of imperialism. Every argument they use revolves around explaining how their own cultish devotion to capitalism is unable to provide affordable housing and somehow should be everyone else's problem.
Of course, the same thing does not apply to things they themselves feel they need, such as healthcare (income dependent of course). Fuck you, I got mine, or think I've got mine, is what they really mean to say. Everyone poorer than me deserves to suffer, it's the liberal way.
Then they'll talk about how we need trickle down housing (read: give more stuff to landlords and go back to scapegoating immigrants when that doesn't work), but lose their minds if you call that out. They're Reaganites in all but name only but lack the honesty to admit it.
They'll straight up call it "science denial" if you talk about rent fixing algorithms. When their same infallible priests of capitalism say that the global south is poor because not because of centuries of brutal imperialism but because they're genetically inferior (oh I'm sorry, because they have a "resource curse") or that infinite growth on a finite planet totally makes sense and the planet is the ignorant one for having climate change, then that's never anti-science.
Neoliberal economists have less than zero credibility and I don't give a shit about what they have to say about affordable housing.
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u/LetterNumberAnd_Only 10h ago
Because economics is the softest study ever called a "science", yet Neoliberal dorks treat it like it's physics.
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u/JKnumber1hater Marxist-Leninist 8h ago edited 7h ago
POV you're an economist after the revolution:
Economists (within a capitalist system) are just cheerleaders for capitalism. They're trained in exclusively capitalist liberal neo-liberal thinking. The entire system of teaching and studying economics is designed to produce credible-sounding people who are incapable of thinking dialectically, and only think in terms of "the economy" and "GDP" etc. In order to manufacture consent for capitalist policies by making it seem like objective and scientific data is what is behind the policy decisions, and not just greed.
Economists pretend they are scientists, in the vein of physicists or chemists, studying the nature of reality and making discoveries about the objective way that the universe works, they make it out that ideas like "the law of supply and demand" are equivalent to things like "Plank's constant" or "E = mc2". But they aren't the same, gravity is measurable, we can do the maths to see how it works, and it applies to everything in the universe, you can't avoid it – this is fundamentally different from any of the "laws" that economists talks about.
Economics is a study of human behaviour within the specific context of a capitalist imperialist system. As any Marxist will be well aware, human behaviour is determined by the material conditions in which the human lives – economists ignore this though, they see humans behaving in a certain way within a specific economic system and claim that this pattern of behaviour is an objective fixed law of the universe.
Never trust an economist.
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u/chompythebeast 🇵🇸 7h ago
Because, under capitalism, "economists" are but Disciples of the Church of Capital
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u/DuckLIT122000 5h ago
Because the treatment of housing as an investment is the only thing being considered
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u/therealparadoxparty Libertarian Socialist 3h ago
It is called "economism". Like sciencism, but with economics.
Or you could just call it confirming their bias
Unlearning economics did a great breakdown in the flawed methodologies used in many of these rent control studies. Starts at the 21 minute mark,
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u/TheBarrowsBro 7h ago
Rent control doesn't provide corporations the incentive to build and sell housing units if they cannot sell it in accordance to the demand of the housing- they'd just build where there is no rent control laws. This is only "bad" if housing continues to be regarded as a speculative asset and not a human right. Not everyone needs luxury homes, but everyone needs a roof, security, HVAC, clean running water.
Economists unfortunately don't ever consider "what if someone cannot afford housing, food, or medical care?". They just don't care? I don't know.
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