On Fri, Aug 21, 2020 at 01:11 PM, Michael Yates wrote: > > Here is a link to a review with commentary on a film about the "teaching" > of economics. Comments welcome. > > https://mronline.org/2020/08/20/your-economics-professor-is-almost-certainly-a-charlatan-a-review-with-commentary-of-my-mis-education-in-3-graphics-a-film-by-mary-filippo/ > >
The point that professors of economics are by and large fakers and lying ideologues seems pretty well taken, and it appears from the review that Filippo provides solid evidence for that. (If they are anything like Professors of English Language and Literature, they also tend to be alcoholics, sexual predators, and snobs with an incurable longing for what they dimly perceive as aristocracy--but that's beside the point.) However that may be, I am particularly struck by the discussion of Mankiw and Borts as vis a vis David Card, Alan Krueger, and other "empirically minded" economists as regards the broader economic effect of raising the minimum wage. According to the "empiricists'" data, raising the minimum wage actually does not seem, on the basis of ascertainable fact to cause unemployment as is apparently universally asserted by the "classical" economists. Point taken. What disturbs me about the necessarily abbreviated discussion in the review is the suggestion that economics is questionable as a "science" (classical economics is the "greatest fraud" in history) together with the clear implication that the "empiricists" are proceeding as scientists by testing hypotheses against data, perhaps even in the true Karl Popper manner. What would the requirements for "scientific" economics be? A great many disciplines strive to be scientific under conditions that prevent rigorous experimentation--paleontology, for example (although the more ingeniously experimental that becomes, the more interesting and valuable its results seem to be). If Marx, for example, is not "scientific," what is he? Can history not be studied scientifically because it cannot be replicated experimentally? Is there any non-magical way of thinking or knowing "scientifically" except through rigorously controlled experimentation followed by statistical analysis of the results? And how do the virtuous empiricists fare when judged by that gold standard? I'm also bemused by the suggestion that "classical" economics is so fraudulent as to be dismissible as a whole out of hand. If the "Austrian School" is "classical, surely von Mises' calculation problem of socialism, later developed by Hayek, posed a valid question to which socialists continue to discuss a variety of answers. And it has to be noted that Mises claimed to have deduced the whole of his economic theory from a rigorously logical series of Kantian synthetic a priori assertions--hardly an "empirical" procedure if you take him at his word. I hope these question prove useful. In any case, this film looks like a worthwhile way to spend an hour. Farans Kalosar > > > -=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=- Groups.io Links: You receive all messages sent to this group. View/Reply Online (#657): https://groups.io/g/marxmail/message/657 Mute This Topic: https://groups.io/mt/76333481/21656 -=-=- POSTING RULES & NOTES<br />#1 YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message.<br />#2 This mail-list, like most, is publicly & permanently archived.<br />#3 Subscribe and post under an alias if #2 is a concern. -=-=- Group Owner: [email protected] Unsubscribe: https://groups.io/g/marxmail/leave/8674936/1316126222/xyzzy [[email protected]] -=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-
