> Does anyone think, at least in the excerpts we read, that the article > attacked libertarian or libertarian-leaning economics as much as it attacked > economics generally? > David Levenstam
It's typical to say that bad science is X, and my political opponents just happen to do X. IMO, it is usually easier to attack an economic theory in this roundabout way than just to confront the idea head on because you really don't have to understand what's going on. Example from my professional life: As is probably obvious, I'm not an economist - I'm a sociologist who takes economics very seriously and I sometimes use economic tools in my research. So I'm always in a position of explaining economic ideas to non-economists and I frequently find that people tend to avoid economic issues. For example, when I explain human capital theory to people, they seem horrified and obsess over whether their sacred cow - education - can be thought of as something as dirty as an investment. Instead of asking whether the idea is internally coherent and has empirical support, they go nuts over just the wording of the theory. Similarly, I find that these articles that trash economics because it is "psuedoscientific" do the same - they obsess over the wording (the use of math) rather than think real hard about the intuitions behind things. Of course, there is always bad research hiding behind equations - but the equations just express an idea - that can be debated - in a coherent way. Fabio
