The GOP is not dumb about economics, they know exactly who benefits from their policies. Republican voters may not understand it, but politicians do.
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In our time, the economics profession has undergone tremendous change for the better, and those neoclassical nostrums have been subjected to intense scrutiny by a new generation of economists who have seen with their own two eyes that markets do not always self-correct (another neoclassical assertion) and that sometimes, government intervention is required to achieve good ends.
Republican politicians didn’t get the memo. ** Nor did the American electorate. ** So it’s very easy to tell people, for example, that you’re going to open up federal lands to more drilling, and there’ll be more oil, and prices will go down. That’s about as much economics as your average person remembers from high school, and it makes intuitive sense.
That's your actual root cause right there.
There was a brief moment when I was a young and impressionable voter who thought yeah, that makes sense. Being fiscally conservative. Having a government that lives within its means.
Then I had a look at the track record of conservative governments and had a good, long, belly laugh, and have never voted for one in my life.
It would help if there were many examples of real, significant fiscal conservatism. Instead it is almost always "reduce spending that doesn't directly benefit me" which is very different.
Like most "conservative" policies.
That coupled with "decrease government income (taxes)" as the first resort means conservative governments always start off in a deficit position and most never get out of it. Decreasing taxes has not done anything to improve the lower 99% lives. It has only worked to shovel money into the 1%.
Yeah, there is a difference now, isn't there? Like I reached voting age in the Reagan era (Mulroney here in Canada, but he was a carbon copy of Reagan). In those days, the conservative philosophy seemed to be just keep spending like crazy while slashing taxes (mostly corporate). Then leave the next government to clean up the mess with an austerity program.
But Trump/Musk actually did gut all sorts of programs while still somehow running up a jaw-dropping deficit, even by Republican standards. Americans are paying higher taxes (through tariffs) and losing services at the same time. Seems pretty indefensible, and I hope there is a reckoning at the mid-terms. Here in Canada, our government is also running a large deficit, mind you. I think it's sort of unavoidable, though, given we are under economic siege.
There's decades and decades of data now - every way you measure the economy, corporate earnings per share, employment rate, GDP - performance soars under democratic rule and tanks under republican rule.
Yeah. My observation on this is that the more conservative party takes power when there is already an economic boom and takes all the credit for it. Then, once they ruin everything, the liberal side has to step in and repair all the damage.
There seems to be this fundamental problem with democracy that when times are good, people don't want to pay taxes, and they vote in the party that promises to lower them. But then when the economy tanks, they want that safety net again. It's an interesting thought experiment as to what would happen if you had it the other way? So while times are good, you raised the taxes so that the government would have a cushion to weather the next economic downturn and help everyone back on their feet.
The heritage foundation.
Since the 70s they have been directing GOP policy.
They're greedy and don't give a shit about anything else. That's it. Their votes are being sold to the highest bidder.
Their whole world view is polluted by their "I'm rich therefore I must deserve it and I must be better than others". You can't grasp much when you think like that.
They aren't dumb, they just don't give any fucks. All they care about is giving more and more tax breaks to their masters, our billionaie oligarchs. And they say anything regardless of truth, logic, sanity - anything that sounds good in the moment to get power, keep power.
They've been indoctrinating instead of teaching, now they are in the find out phase.
Oh they know about economics, enough to get what they want then leave everyone else holding the bag.
I mean, it's pretty much everyone. I'm including macroeconomists in there too, the best model they have without some horrific quantifiability problem is only 60% accurate.
Economics, as an intellectual discipline, is closer to theology than physics. Its power is proportional to the belief it commands.
Finance is an arbitrary subset of mathematics, cherry picked by the owning class, and applied as their supporting mythology.
It’s entirely imaginary, which means alternatives are only ever a conjuring away.
This isn't true, though. Economics is a material study of social relations that objectively exist and are reinforced by how we produce and distribute. Bourgeois economics tends towards idealism, turning it from materialism. We cannot simply "conjure" a new system. Systems are material processes, and so we must take a scientific, rather than utopian, approach.
What they said is actually totally reasonable. People (particularly economists) treat economics as though it's a hard science akin to physics or chemistry, but it's a soft science. They gave David Card a nobel in economics for figuring out a way to actually test hypotheses some of the time. In 2021.
- Pascal used probability/expected-value reasoning to argue that wagering on God is rational.
- Gödel formally encoded an argument for God's existence in higher-order modal logic.
- Plantinga uses modal logic to formulate the ontological argument.
- Bayes’ theorem used to argue for the existence of God by Richard Swinburne.
People use math to justify things. That is not the same as proving something. Show me cases where econs use math to prove something intrinsic to economies.
That’s exactly the distinction I’m asking about. Algebra and coordinate geometry can represent supply and demand, and they can prove what follows if the model’s assumptions hold. They do not prove that the model accurately describes an actual economy.
For example, from assumed supply and demand functions, you can mathematically prove where their curves intersect. But mathematics alone cannot prove that real consumers have that demand curve, that real producers have that supply curve, that the relevant variables were held constant, or that the resulting equilibrium is what caused the observed market price.
“Price rises when demand increases, ceteris paribus” is a model-derived prediction. Whether real markets actually behave that way, under what conditions, and how accurately… all of that is empirical questions. Data can support, falsify, estimate, or justify the model’s applicability but the algebra cannot prove its correspondence to reality.
This is in stark contrast to physics. It makes economics look more like theology. Although, that’s probably still a loaded statement.
Regardless, “nearly every concept in Econ 101 has a mathematical breakdown” doesn’t answer my question. I’m specifically asking for an example where the mathematics proves that the mathematical model itself is an accurate description of the real economy, rather than merely proving consequences within the model.
And if the answer is that economics establishes that correspondence empirically rather than mathematically, then that’s precisely the distinction I was making.
In the bible one plus one plus one equals one or three or something.
Where’s the flaw in my comment?
Except in terms of predictive power it's just barely more successful than random chance. As a discipline it's still largely in its most primitive stage, and still full of unproven and largely hypothetical assumptions that amount to little more than idle musings and superstitions. It's so full of holes it's just slightly more rigorous than pseudoscience. Perhaps in 100 years it will develop into a more respectable discipline, but at this stage it's at best a tool for short term modelling and post hoc analysis.
in my experience, Econ education is the study of a single economic system - capitalism. Did they ever discuss alternative socioeconomic systems or simply say 'state ownership = bad'?
No not my major - my experience was just econ 101 but I like reading about economics in my free time, and it seemed like econ 101 at my US university should have been called Capitalism 101. My comment was moreso to see if that changes at later stages in the economics-major program.
it uses math to explain it
It uses math sometimes.
Economics is not a hard science. Which is fine. But let's not pretend it's all math and logic. It includes attempting to predict human behavior, you can't do that with just math.
"Do people think we're currently in a recession" is actually used by economists as a recession indicator.
Economics is the social control mechanism that filled the void vacated by religion after the enlightenment.
Finance replaced mythology. Banks and financial institutions replaced churches and cathedrals. Economists replaced the clergy. GDP replaced God.
Mathematics is the foundation of reality, accounting is a selective subset of mathematics.
Economics is functionally religion that wears a tattered robe of finance which is patched with parts of accounting that economists find useful to support the doctrine of their particular model.
Like religion, economics can prove useful for a society, but similarly it has no intrinsic legitimacy imposing influence on or over those who don’t willingly and non-coercively subscribe to its narrative.
I think you may need to simply define the terms used after "calculus." I just did two things that oddly coincide with having read this comment. One, skipped a YT video that promised to simply explain calculus, and two, commented elsewhere:
"One thing that really scares me about the fall of the empire of my birth is, even if a revolution succeeded, not only who would be in charge, but would they actually understand large scale administration, distribution, logistics, of goods and finance? We've allowed ourselves to be so proudly uneducated for si long, because "There are professionals for that." Well, yes, but honest ones?“
Edit, because I should add, an honest one that actually will be appointed to the task.

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