(A meta comment: I feel like some of your comments could be summarized as “this is already obvious to people who study economics” and that your tone conveys that you mean this as some kind of objection. I think this post is quite relevant to discourse norms around saying obvious things.)
A meta comment: I feel like some of your comments could be summarized as “this is already obvious to people who study economics”
I don’t think obviousness was my point. Sorry if I gave that impression. What I wanted to convey was that economists having been studying these issues for decades and have made a lot of progress, so it probably doesn’t make sense to start over with a new framework, unless you could explain why the standard economics ones are problematic and how the new framework fixes those problems. In particular, I think the ideas of comparative advantage and asymmetric information are really powerful but do not seem to have analogues in your framework (or at least they haven’t been spelled out yet).
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)
I agree with Ben here and won’t repeat what he said.
In general, I think thinking things through yourself from first principles is a valuable exercise even if someone has already thought the thing through, so even if the economics field functioned better than it did, I would still not agree that “it probably doesn’t make sense to start over with a new framework, unless you could explain why the standard economics ones are problematic and how the new framework fixes those problems.”
Re comparative advantage: this is pretty easy to talk about in my framework; you can have different generators (with different conversion ratios and rates of conversion) in different locations, and produce faster feedback loops by using the more-efficient generators, which requires moving stuff around.
Re asymmetric information: also pretty easy, this is information produced in one location that is not communicated to other locations.
In general, I think thinking things through yourself from first principles is a valuable exercise even if someone has already thought the thing through
Given that the “first principles” must by necessity be much simplified compared to the real world, how do you know whether the derivations come anywhere close to explaining it? Academia has done a lot of the necessary vetting/testing for its frameworks so I don’t think it’s a good idea to start over with different principles (unless, again, you can explain why they’re likely to solve some problems in the standard ones).
Re asymmetric information: also pretty easy, this is information produced in one location that is not communicated to other locations.
Can your framework derive the well known consequences of asymmetric information in economics, such as it often leading to failure to agree upon mutually beneficial deals?
Given that the “first principles” must by necessity be much simplified compared to the real world, how do you know whether the derivations come anywhere close to explaining it?
Academia’s models are also simplified. Given things like the replication crisis, I am really not convinced that academia is good at vetting things outside STEM. Generation of known-good ideas can be separated into generating ideas and checking them; generating ideas can be useful even they can’t be fully checked yet. In practice, to vet my models, I look at things like: which conclusions are logically sound (e.g. that growing economies require positive material feedback loops), whether it matches up with information I have, compatibility with other models/intuitions (where incompatibility could mean either model is wrong), and so on. I don’t think this is that different from what the most generative academics do. If I were reading academic papers, I would be doing the same checks to determine what to trust and how to integrate the ideas into my own models.
Can your framework derive the well known consequences of asymmetric information in economics, such as it often leading to failure to agree upon mutually beneficial deals?
Kind of. I haven’t discussed rational agents yet. But, it’s possible to say that some systems will be more ecologically fit if they hide certain information, and some will be more ecologically fit if they only make trades given the info that making this trade would gain some necessary resource, from which it is derived that ecologically fit systems will fail to make trades that increase the fitness of both of them, where ecological fitness could be defined in terms of speed and sustainability of positive feedback loop. There are different advantages/disadvantages to thinking about things this way instead of in terms of rational agency.
(A meta comment: I feel like some of your comments could be summarized as “this is already obvious to people who study economics” and that your tone conveys that you mean this as some kind of objection. I think this post is quite relevant to discourse norms around saying obvious things.)
I don’t think obviousness was my point. Sorry if I gave that impression. What I wanted to convey was that economists having been studying these issues for decades and have made a lot of progress, so it probably doesn’t make sense to start over with a new framework, unless you could explain why the standard economics ones are problematic and how the new framework fixes those problems. In particular, I think the ideas of comparative advantage and asymmetric information are really powerful but do not seem to have analogues in your framework (or at least they haven’t been spelled out yet).
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!
Ok, this is much easier to respond to, thanks.
I agree with Ben here and won’t repeat what he said.
In general, I think thinking things through yourself from first principles is a valuable exercise even if someone has already thought the thing through, so even if the economics field functioned better than it did, I would still not agree that “it probably doesn’t make sense to start over with a new framework, unless you could explain why the standard economics ones are problematic and how the new framework fixes those problems.”
Re comparative advantage: this is pretty easy to talk about in my framework; you can have different generators (with different conversion ratios and rates of conversion) in different locations, and produce faster feedback loops by using the more-efficient generators, which requires moving stuff around.
Re asymmetric information: also pretty easy, this is information produced in one location that is not communicated to other locations.
Given that the “first principles” must by necessity be much simplified compared to the real world, how do you know whether the derivations come anywhere close to explaining it? Academia has done a lot of the necessary vetting/testing for its frameworks so I don’t think it’s a good idea to start over with different principles (unless, again, you can explain why they’re likely to solve some problems in the standard ones).
Can your framework derive the well known consequences of asymmetric information in economics, such as it often leading to failure to agree upon mutually beneficial deals?
Academia’s models are also simplified. Given things like the replication crisis, I am really not convinced that academia is good at vetting things outside STEM. Generation of known-good ideas can be separated into generating ideas and checking them; generating ideas can be useful even they can’t be fully checked yet. In practice, to vet my models, I look at things like: which conclusions are logically sound (e.g. that growing economies require positive material feedback loops), whether it matches up with information I have, compatibility with other models/intuitions (where incompatibility could mean either model is wrong), and so on. I don’t think this is that different from what the most generative academics do. If I were reading academic papers, I would be doing the same checks to determine what to trust and how to integrate the ideas into my own models.
Kind of. I haven’t discussed rational agents yet. But, it’s possible to say that some systems will be more ecologically fit if they hide certain information, and some will be more ecologically fit if they only make trades given the info that making this trade would gain some necessary resource, from which it is derived that ecologically fit systems will fail to make trades that increase the fitness of both of them, where ecological fitness could be defined in terms of speed and sustainability of positive feedback loop. There are different advantages/disadvantages to thinking about things this way instead of in terms of rational agency.