This points at a thing that’s been bothering me for a while in the discourse around economics.
Often there are specific concepts or models worth learning from a discipline. For instance, comparative advantage and asymmetric information are important, but not all that complicated and hard to understand, and once you understand them you can apply them in new circumstances without holding onto the formalism that professionals fit them into.
In much rarer cases, an entire disciplinary framework is worth preserving. Physics in the Newtonian paradigm (by which I mean to include most of 20th Century physics as well) is an example—you can’t really understand “momentum” or “energy” except in relation to a much larger mathematized framework, which has a huge amount of descriptive, explanatory, and predictive power.
My sense of economics is that many concepts are important, but the frameworks are systematically obscuring a lot of what’s important to see. A lot of what I tried to do with Talents and There is a war was explain a bunch of stuff I’d learned from reading widely about economics, in nonideological terms that would help the reader apply patterns economists know about to concrete situations without providing anything pretending to be a comprehensive framework, and without claiming the mantle of what I consider spurious intellectual authority.
Most comments I see of the type “you should engage more with economics” don’t really seem to be thinking about costs clearly, which does not exactly reflect well on the discipline. In particular, it doesn’t seem like “economists have thought about this stuff a lot and made some progress” tells us much about whether the framework of economics is worth the time learning. The Roman Catholic Church has thought about moral and political philosophy a bunch, but while I might recommend someone read Augustine or some other Catholic writer to learn some particular insights or models that I think are relevant to their interests, I wouldn’t think of suggesting they engage with the Catholic framework rather than starting over. The same with academic research psychology. Why should I think better of academic economics?
The burden of evidence is a lot lower for recommendations like “this specific book or paper by an economist contains models that I expect would make this substantially clearer or more complete” or “this subfield of economics has standard arguments against your position that I’d need a clear response to in order to accept your model.”
There’s another reason to engage with a field, which is to contribute to the field—i.e. they might want to learn what someone has to say, but be unable to engage with it if it doesn’t speak their language. But almost no one seems to be saying this.
My sense of economics is that many concepts are important, but the frameworks are systematically obscuring a lot of what’s important to see.
Can you expand on this? How are the frameworks systematically obscuring a lot of what’s important to see?
in nonideological terms
Economics doesn’t seem very ideological to me, or maybe I’m just too brainwashed to see it. Can you explain more?
Most comments I see of the type “you should engage more with economics” don’t really seem to be thinking about costs clearly
Ah, yeah I wasn’t thinking in terms of “costs of learning economics”, because learning it was a lot of fun for me. Kind of curious why people who otherwise seem very similar to myself (such as Jessica) don’t find it fun.
Why should I think better of academic economics?
Economics (as a real world phenomena) is really complex and often counter-intuitive. It’s very easy to make mistakes when thinking about it and academia has already made and fixed a lot of those mistakes. Studying academic economics gave me intuitions and formal tools that make it much easier to see such mistakes in myself and others. See this recent thread as an example.
It’s true though that I haven’t been thinking that others might find it very costly to learn, in which case learning some detached concepts and simplified models might be better than nothing, unless it makes one feel overconfident instead of just confused. So I’d prefer to see some disclaimers on such posts like “Please try to learn academic economics, but if that’s not fun for you or you don’t have enough time, these simplified concepts/models/frameworks might help. Keep in mind that real world economics is really complex and often counterintuitive, and these concepts/models/frameworks haven’t been as widely vetted or extensively tested as concepts/models/frameworks in academic economics.”
Sorry, of the economics textbooks I’ve read, I’ve either forgotten which ones I used, or they haven’t been updated since the 90s. And a lot of what I learned were from things like lectures, articles, and papers, instead of textbooks. I can only suggest some subfields in economics that seem especially interesting to me, and recommend that you start directly with graduate level textbooks (or review papers if textbooks don’t exist yet), because the undergraduate ones tend to oversimplify a lot of things.
game theory (both cooperative and non-cooperative, ETA: but see this comment for why cooperative game theory isn’t very widely known)
industrial organization
public choice theory
economics of property rights
theory of the firm
family economics
information economics
market/mechanism design
finance
microeconomics (for general concepts like comparative advantage, transaction costs, and deadweight loss)
This points at a thing that’s been bothering me for a while in the discourse around economics.
Often there are specific concepts or models worth learning from a discipline. For instance, comparative advantage and asymmetric information are important, but not all that complicated and hard to understand, and once you understand them you can apply them in new circumstances without holding onto the formalism that professionals fit them into.
In much rarer cases, an entire disciplinary framework is worth preserving. Physics in the Newtonian paradigm (by which I mean to include most of 20th Century physics as well) is an example—you can’t really understand “momentum” or “energy” except in relation to a much larger mathematized framework, which has a huge amount of descriptive, explanatory, and predictive power.
My sense of economics is that many concepts are important, but the frameworks are systematically obscuring a lot of what’s important to see. A lot of what I tried to do with Talents and There is a war was explain a bunch of stuff I’d learned from reading widely about economics, in nonideological terms that would help the reader apply patterns economists know about to concrete situations without providing anything pretending to be a comprehensive framework, and without claiming the mantle of what I consider spurious intellectual authority.
Most comments I see of the type “you should engage more with economics” don’t really seem to be thinking about costs clearly, which does not exactly reflect well on the discipline. In particular, it doesn’t seem like “economists have thought about this stuff a lot and made some progress” tells us much about whether the framework of economics is worth the time learning. The Roman Catholic Church has thought about moral and political philosophy a bunch, but while I might recommend someone read Augustine or some other Catholic writer to learn some particular insights or models that I think are relevant to their interests, I wouldn’t think of suggesting they engage with the Catholic framework rather than starting over. The same with academic research psychology. Why should I think better of academic economics?
The burden of evidence is a lot lower for recommendations like “this specific book or paper by an economist contains models that I expect would make this substantially clearer or more complete” or “this subfield of economics has standard arguments against your position that I’d need a clear response to in order to accept your model.”
There’s another reason to engage with a field, which is to contribute to the field—i.e. they might want to learn what someone has to say, but be unable to engage with it if it doesn’t speak their language. But almost no one seems to be saying this.
Can you expand on this? How are the frameworks systematically obscuring a lot of what’s important to see?
Economics doesn’t seem very ideological to me, or maybe I’m just too brainwashed to see it. Can you explain more?
Ah, yeah I wasn’t thinking in terms of “costs of learning economics”, because learning it was a lot of fun for me. Kind of curious why people who otherwise seem very similar to myself (such as Jessica) don’t find it fun.
Economics (as a real world phenomena) is really complex and often counter-intuitive. It’s very easy to make mistakes when thinking about it and academia has already made and fixed a lot of those mistakes. Studying academic economics gave me intuitions and formal tools that make it much easier to see such mistakes in myself and others. See this recent thread as an example.
It’s true though that I haven’t been thinking that others might find it very costly to learn, in which case learning some detached concepts and simplified models might be better than nothing, unless it makes one feel overconfident instead of just confused. So I’d prefer to see some disclaimers on such posts like “Please try to learn academic economics, but if that’s not fun for you or you don’t have enough time, these simplified concepts/models/frameworks might help. Keep in mind that real world economics is really complex and often counterintuitive, and these concepts/models/frameworks haven’t been as widely vetted or extensively tested as concepts/models/frameworks in academic economics.”
Are there any economics textbooks you’d recommend?
Sorry, of the economics textbooks I’ve read, I’ve either forgotten which ones I used, or they haven’t been updated since the 90s. And a lot of what I learned were from things like lectures, articles, and papers, instead of textbooks. I can only suggest some subfields in economics that seem especially interesting to me, and recommend that you start directly with graduate level textbooks (or review papers if textbooks don’t exist yet), because the undergraduate ones tend to oversimplify a lot of things.
game theory (both cooperative and non-cooperative, ETA: but see this comment for why cooperative game theory isn’t very widely known)
industrial organization
public choice theory
economics of property rights
theory of the firm
family economics
information economics
market/mechanism design
finance
microeconomics (for general concepts like comparative advantage, transaction costs, and deadweight loss)
macroeconomics
micro foundations of macroeconomics
monetary theory
This is helpful, thanks!