Some people political movements prioritize other stuff, but you can’t get elected by saying that you don’t care about the economy, it would be a political suicide. Therefore they claim that by a happy coincidence their ideas about the stuff they prioritize and economics prescribe the same solutions.
Economics is about more than just the economy. It’s generally about how people react to incentives. If you look at feminism equal pay is quite high on their list of priorities.
If I were to steelman the usefulness of the argument, I’d say the conclusion is that positions on economics shouldn’t be indispensable parts of a political movement, because that makes it impossible to reason about economics and check whether that position is wrong. Which is just a specific form of the general argument against identifying with object-level beliefs*.
*For that matter, one should perhaps be careful about identifying with meta-level beliefs as well, although I don’t know if that’s entirely possible for a human to do, even discounting the argument that there might be conservation of tribalism. It might be possible to reduce ones’ identity down to a general framework for coming up with good meta-level beliefs, and avoid object-level
Scott Adams
Some people political movements prioritize other stuff, but you can’t get elected by saying that you don’t care about the economy, it would be a political suicide. Therefore they claim that by a happy coincidence their ideas about the stuff they prioritize and economics prescribe the same solutions.
Economics is about more than just the economy. It’s generally about how people react to incentives. If you look at feminism equal pay is quite high on their list of priorities.
A perfect example of a fully general counter-argument!
Nup, because you can bottom out in surveys of economic consensus :-)
If I were to steelman the usefulness of the argument, I’d say the conclusion is that positions on economics shouldn’t be indispensable parts of a political movement, because that makes it impossible to reason about economics and check whether that position is wrong. Which is just a specific form of the general argument against identifying with object-level beliefs*.
*For that matter, one should perhaps be careful about identifying with meta-level beliefs as well, although I don’t know if that’s entirely possible for a human to do, even discounting the argument that there might be conservation of tribalism. It might be possible to reduce ones’ identity down to a general framework for coming up with good meta-level beliefs, and avoid object-level