Slashdot Mirror
How Often Do Economists Commit Misconduct?
schwit1 (797399) writes A survey of professional academic economists finds that a large percentage are quite willing to cheat or fake data to get the results they want. From the paper's abstract: "This study reports the results of a survey of professional, mostly academic economists about their research norms and scientific misbehavior. Behavior such as data fabrication or plagiarism are (almost) unanimously rejected and admitted by less than 4% of participants. Research practices that are often considered 'questionable,' e.g., strategic behavior while analyzing results or in the publication process, are rejected by at least 60%. Despite their low justifiability, these behaviors are widespread. Ninety-four percent report having engaged in at least one unaccepted research practice."
That less than 4% engage in "data fabrication or plagiarism" might seem low, but it is a terrible statistic . ... 40% admit to doing what they agree are "questionable" research practices, while 94% admit to committing "at least one unaccepted research practice." In other words, almost none of these academic economists can be trusted in the slightest. As the paper notes, "these behaviors are widespread.""
That less than 4% engage in "data fabrication or plagiarism" might seem low, but it is a terrible statistic . ... 40% admit to doing what they agree are "questionable" research practices, while 94% admit to committing "at least one unaccepted research practice." In other words, almost none of these academic economists can be trusted in the slightest. As the paper notes, "these behaviors are widespread.""
You are a hippocruite.
These are people who analyze and predict the health of countries. Of course their results are more politically motivated than evidence based. Would it even be ethical to tell a truth that would cause an economic disaster? If economists had known in advance of one of the great depressions that it was going to happen, and releasing the results would of only sped-up the collapse, should they release the information? And it will always be better politically for the government to be just as surprised as everyone else when things go belly up, instead of being the president who predicted, but was unable to solve, the coming collapse.
Troll is not a replacement for I disagree.
your opinion is important. only your vote counts.
Depending on what policy a politician wants to push he can cite either traditional economics or Keynesian economics as part of his speel to push a bill. Economists are conflicting in their advice. Sure you can make a real good case for aiming for a surplus because that is good for the nation in the long run. But a lot of politicians are in it for their own personal gain in the short run. They'll borrow from the debt, have a spending party that feels good for a short run, but put the nation in a worse state for the long run. It is unsustainable and only benefits the elite who get crony deals.
Also scientists are supposed to be pretty unbiased, but the marketing people who use their unbiased data will take it out of context. A marketing person can tell you to put radioactive waste on your face because science has said it gives you a radiant glow. You think I joke, but I saw Lucky Charms touted as a health food on tv some years ago because a science study said oats are good for the heart and Lucky Charms has oat pieces. On top of that, it's not hard think there are times where scientists also get pressure from the corporation funding their science to give them the results they want. Just like economists might get pressure too.
God spoke to me
Who purchases the services of economists? Who consumes their work product?
A lot of economists are paid by central banks one way or another:
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/...
One useful tactic for managing the economy is manipulating public opinion. Especially the opinion of those members of the public who manage huge quantities of other people's money. The job of the economist then is not necessarily to discover the true state of the economy, but to convince others that is it in a certain state in order to influence their behavior.
- illegal immigration
- legal immigration (H1B caps)
- expansion of casino gambling
- Obamacare (government involvement in health care insurance)
- legalization of marijuana
- government tax breaks and seed money for clean energy R&D
- government funding of bullet trains
- higher income taxe rates for the wealthiest taxpayers
Which of these are beneficial or detrimental to our economy? Pretend that you're a professional economist for a moment, now pick any of these and flip a coin to determine which side you'll take (assume that outside forces may make it worth your while, wink wink....)
Think you'll have any problem putting together some research papers that prove your point, many times over? Probably not.
"Plagiarism" does not belong in the same bin o' offenses as data fabrication. The former commits an "offense by definition because citations get academics off", an "offense" solely of non-attribution; while the latter produces fraudulent and untrustworthy outcomes.
By the time 200 people have cited the same landmark study's findings, I can guarantee you that half of them have "paraphrased" it into the exact same thing. The whole idea of plagiarism amounts to a race to the bottom as to who can rephrase something otherwise-simple in the most awkward manner possible
So when a new study lumps plagiarism in with fabricating data, we see all too plainly what really drives this shit - Credit, credit, credit. Publish or, worse than perishing, you get stuck actually *gasp!* teaching those obnoxious freshmen your name attracted to the school in the first place.
I'll just leave this here...
MonkeyDex
Some indexes are more fun than others. MonkeyDex is the first index of Internet stocks picked by a monkey. When it was created in January 1999, Raven, a 6-year-old female monkey, tossed darts at a dartboard plastered with the names of 133 Internet-related stocks. This year the board carried 281 company names.
Raven, who has her own Web site, showed up many of Wall Street's finest minds with a 213 percent gain for 1999. Had Raven been employed at a Wall Street mutual fund, her performance would rank her as the 22nd best money manager in the country, outperforming more than 6,000 Wall Street pros, according to the Internet Stock Review, creators of the MonkeyDex.
"It's all in the wrist action," Raven is reported to have said.
"If you lay all economists end to end and north to south, they will still all point different directions".
So where is the same study for the other politically influenced sciences such as Climate Science? Or should we make assumptions about the political motivations of the researchers behind *this* study?
Unless you have proof of that - proof that will make it into scientific journals - then I suspect you're a member of that largest group of people who commit misconduct: the idiot who is an expert on everything.
If 94% of academic economists have fudged things to make their papers look better - what about commercial economists, where they have a stronger financial incentive? What about political economists?
At first I was worried - but then I realised their trust level is already slightly below that of lawyers.
Why would anyone engrave "Elbereth"?
Economy as such is not a science.
... legal in origin, not scientific. Since money itself is an invention that doesn't exist in nature, it is entirely fabricated.
A civil engineer, a chemist and an economist are traveling in the countryside. Weary, they stop at a small country inn. "I only have two rooms, so one of you will have to sleep in the barn," the innkeeper says. The civil engineer volunteers to sleep in the barn, goes outside, and the others go to bed. In a short time they're awakened by a knock. It's the engineer, who says, "There's a cow in that barn. I'm a Hindu, and it would offend my beliefs to sleep next to a sacred animal." The chemist says that, OK, he'll sleep in the barn. The others go back to bed, but soon are awakened by another knock. It's the chemist who says, "There's a pig in that barn. I'm Jewish, and cannot sleep next to an unclean animal." So the economist is sent to the barn. It's getting late, the others are very tired and soon fall asleep, Bu they're awakened by an even louder knocking. They open the door and are surprised by what they see: It's the cow and the pig!
"I say we take off, nuke the site from orbit. It's the only way to be sure."
I would like a study that finds how often do people misuse statistics to make a point.
100% of astrologists make shit up. it's pretty much the definition for it...
world was created 5 seconds before this post as it is.
A Fortune 500 company was interviewing for a CFO, and narrowed the field down to 4 candidates - a mathematician, a market researcher, a statistician, and an economist. Because they were so close in every other respect, they brought all 4 in together for an executive panel interview.
The CEO asked the interviewees "What's 2+2"?
The mathematician replied "Four".
The market researcher said "Ha! I heard you asked the tricky questions! So..." - and here he rustled through the pile of paperwork he'd brought with him - "...yesterday I surveyed 100 second grade teachers, and the most common answers ranged between 3 and 5".
The statistician looked sideways at the columns of figures in front of the market reseacher, spent a few minutes jotting on a napkin, and said "I can state with 95% confidence the answer is four".
The economist glanced at the rest of the candidates with barely-disguised pity, leaned over the desk, and whispered in the CEO's ear...
"What would you like it to be?"
What part of "a well regulated militia" do you not understand?
Well, ok, but do you know how hard it would be to prove anything if you actually had to stick to the facts? They'd all be out of a job!
Ah but apparently 87.235% of astrologers are so good at making shit up they even manage to fool themselves into believing it's real!
Go back to Yahoo Comments where you fit in.
Unless you've read the papers on why they make the adjustments and what they do to make the adjustments you're just making shit up to fit your worldview. Something you could probably do is get the raw data and the adjusted data and compare them. You'll find the difference isn't that large.
Would it even be ethical to tell a truth that would cause an economic disaster?
Even in this situation it still does not make it ethical to fudge the data and lie: you simply shut up and say nothing. To know whether it would be ethical to reveal the truth you need to know the consequence of keeping quiet. For example if you found that a certain company was in financial trouble but still had a chance to pull through (and were acting to maximize that chance without dragging in new investors) you might keep quiet to help avoid financial disaster for those affected. However it would still be wrong to fudge the data and publish a report claiming that they were financially sound.
Its no wonder that conservatives don't trust the research coming out of academia on many other issues, such as global warming, psychology/psychiatry, etc. They have come to expect this kind of behavior from a system that "peer reviews" itself when its members are not representative of the general public's viewpoint. Over 75% of academia self-identifies as liberal.
Every time one of them opens his/her mouth.
General Relativity: Space-time tells matter where to go; Matter tells space-time what shape to be.
What we need is an academic separation of powers.
Those who collect data should not be the same as those that analyze it. And neither of those groups should store the data.
Data should be collected by professional data collectors that don't care about the meaning of their data and have nothing to prove by collecting it. They should merely be judged on the quality and quantity of their data. Nothing else.
That data should be submitted to an archiving department... call them librarians or archivists or whatever.
Then analysts can pull from that data and base their studies on it.
In the case that an analyst does not have the information he needs in the archive, he submits a request for the data to the archive which then posts the data request publicly as a job order to collect that data.
The data collectors get the information, submit it to the archive, and EVERYONE can see the data.
Doubtless someone has a problem with this... I don't claim to have a perfect system here. I just think too often the sources for things and the information is not readily available.
If they must cite information in the archive then they can't make it up without outright lying about what they saw in the archive.
And even then we could establish some automatic data cross referencing protocols that allow us to instantly link and cross reference claims with their data sources and instantly highlight any discrepancies. This requires that the "papers" be coded to facilitate this process but that just requires a program to stamp the correct code in the correct syntax into the document. The researchers don't need to know how to do that. They just need to run the program, key in the source of the data in the field, and then the linking code should be automatically generated.
Make as a part of every submission a computer check of the files. Anything cited that doesn't exist in the archive gets flagged... and thing cited from the archive that doesn't match the archive gets flagged.
The actual validity of the claims cannot be checked by computer. But we should be able to ensure data integrity.
I've decided to stop wasting my time responding to AC trolls/sockpuppets... so if you want a response from me... login.
NOAA's been changing temperatures to fit a computer model of what temperature data should be, instead of just using the data.
Hey! Did you know that your brain inverts the image that your eyes perceive to fit the model of which way is "up"? Everything is a lie.
> Remember the collapse from the housing bubble burst? Who predicted that? Precious few men and women knew it was coming, and damned near none had any idea how bad it could be.
That would be pretty much the entire Republican party. Here's Ron Paul explaining exactly what would happen, in 2002. This is six years before the collapse:
http://www.ronpaul.com/2008-09...
Really? I'd say it's psychology as a field that produces the most bad science. Utterly subjective criteria, no scientific rigor, and coming to arbitrary conclusions based on already flawed data (i.e. saying that porn makes people into women haters because they were asked questions after watching porn and they suddenly supported reduced sentences for rapists).
Want a study saying that video games don't cause violence? Want one that says they do? There's a study for everyone! And worst of all, people believe this nonsense and cite these studies as if they're going to debunk someone's arguments. What a pitiful situation.
Astrologists aren't in charge of the Federal Reserve, attempting to influence the economy and ruining it in the process. They aren't the ones lying to the people every day, telling them that devaluing their currency is good for them, hoping all the while that the public doesn't wise up and lynch them for the heinous acts they are committing.
They are economists. Their "profession" is somewhat less respectable than astrologers. Anyone who puts any faith in anything that they say deserves to be a victim of their fraud. Sure, our whole economy might suffer, but since there is no real science to anything to do, it would suffer no matter if they used unaccepted research practices or not.
I'm an American. I love this country and the freedoms that we used to have.
Reminds me of the time the jobs numbers miraculously dropped from 8.1% to 7.8% in a single month, just in time to try to influence the 2012 election.
http://nypost.com/2013/11/18/census-faked-2012-election-jobs-report/
Yeah more of something means it's automatically weaker, like more mass devalues gravity /eye roll.
The parent says this is highly troubling. Not necessarily. Is this number significant? (Cannot check myself AORN due to the paywall.)
http://www.scientificamerican....
Mar 17, 2008 By Robert Nadeau
RTF, if not Economics are about as scientific as Chinese medicine.
Without reading further than the title, my answer is:
too fucking often to be forgiven. The interest rate when I was born was 18%. Enough said.
Because governments over the last couple centuries (other than perhaps the Reagan administration) don't do stupid stuff based on what astrologers make up.
Medicine isn't far behind. People have been complaining about this for years. It is bad/misused stats. The null hypothesis needs to be predicted by your theory. When people use the opposite the logic is messed up, yet this method has been spreading like a disease from educational research, to psychology, to the social sciences, to medicine/biology, and most recently to the historically better sciences of physics and astronomy. I do not know about chemistry.
Dot-com was a more productive use of capital, but Greenspan popped that. Also, markets aren't very efficient on their own. Sure, slavery produced more cotton than the post-Civil-War south did, but only by using force and ignoring unalienable rights. Markets left to themselves leave a lot of people out, and even finance founder Fischer Black thought markets were only efficient to within a factor of 2. So that house might cost $50k or $200k, a wide spread for salesmen to profit. That's what Paul thinks is better than government trying to help poor people? Let the salesmen get rich off arbitrage while the poor stay homeless?
As a professional in finance,I've had to wrestle with economists. To a large extent, the profession itself is a fake: the ultimate employer is the Sovereign, who will look askance on anybody saying that it either goofed or that he must get smaller.
start with this in your mind 30 years back, fast forward, and you'll see that macroscopic events in the Economy dept. get ignored, simply because they are in opposition to the academic thought.
I can give you an example: it made the papers in Italy that the European powers that be are starting a study of Abenomics, with a view to applying it here. While as an Italian I can understand the politicians' liking of a mix of runaway deficits, easy money and public investment, this disregards a number of problems:
1.most of the Abenomics tenets are already in place, to no perceived improvement;
2.public spending as a percentage of GDP is way above 50% in most places here, so the actual tax base is shrunk;
3. and last, there's an example that worked that the politicians are emphatically ignoring.
the example is Canada. it exited the 2008 crisis better than Europe, in part because of his proximity to the USA and the free trade it has with that nation, but also because it embraced a reduction in the public sector, and a control/reduction of tax pressure.
Do you believe in that causality? after 25 years tallking with these shamans who are called economist, my opinion is "insufficient data": economy is a dismal science. BUT, it worked. and Europe is studying a failing policy simply because it is similar to what they want to do.
"If a boss demands loyalty, give him integrity. But if he demands integrity, give him loyalty." (John Boyd, 1927-1997)
It's worth noting a pattern of "adjusting" the data that predominately favors the leading theories. That's some seriously questionable stuff in an field. Fortunately for the climate change guys, you can just ignore the ground station data entirely and still have a reasonable conversation about this stuff.
I'm far, far more concerned with constant tuning of the models to meet the data then vice versa. That may sound backwards, but ask anyone who's made a model to predict the stock market based on fitting his model to all historical data how that worked out. Descriptive power is not a significant reason to expect predictive power from a hypothesis (necessary, but very far from sufficient). And every time you tinker, you reset the clock on knowing if you have any predictive power.
It takes many years to test the predictive power of a climate model. 15? 20? Depends on who you ask, but the better part of a career. The models from 15 years ago failed pretty hard, prediction-wise. We're a long way from anyone having the right to be arrogant about this stuff, and every time someone adjusts their model to make it match observations, that's one more model reset, one less chance to move from hand-wavy descriptivism to a tested theory.
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
Economists still believe in infinite growth in a finite world.
To me, that's a proof by contradiction that economics as "science" is utter bullshit.
This explains how and why economists lead the charge against climate science. If fudging data is common in their field of study perhaps they think others freezing their arse off in Antarctica are fudging stuff when they obviously could be doing that just as effectively somewhere more comfortable?
It's worth noting a pattern of "adjusting" the data that predominately favors the leading theories. That's some seriously questionable stuff in an field. Fortunately for the climate change guys, you can just ignore the ground station data entirely and still have a reasonable conversation about this stuff.
That's still judging the adjustments on your perception of bias by the scientists. Read and understand the papers that describe the reasons and means for the adjustments. Then we can have a reasonable conversation.
I'm far, far more concerned with constant tuning of the models to meet the data then vice versa. That may sound backwards, but ask anyone who's made a model to predict the stock market based on fitting his model to all historical data how that worked out. Descriptive power is not a significant reason to expect predictive power from a hypothesis (necessary, but very far from sufficient). And every time you tinker, you reset the clock on knowing if you have any predictive power.
It takes many years to test the predictive power of a climate model. 15? 20? Depends on who you ask, but the better part of a career. The models from 15 years ago failed pretty hard, prediction-wise. We're a long way from anyone having the right to be arrogant about this stuff, and every time someone adjusts their model to make it match observations, that's one more model reset, one less chance to move from hand-wavy descriptivism to a tested theory.
It sounds as if you think climate models are merely numerical exercises in curve fitting rather than models of the actual physical interactions that occur in the climate. The tuning that occurs is adjustments to the physics involved. They never just look at the real world temperature records or precipitation records and say "Let's tweak this to make it fit the curve better." Climate models are projecting 30 year trends so it takes that long to totally test them. You don't need to worry about the adjustments to models because you still have the projections the model made that can be compared to what happened over the 30 year period. So far models are accurate within the expectations the modelers have for them.
Economists, as a whole, make climate science seem precise by comparison. What other field can give a Nobel Prize to someone who's never had a single correct prediction? Other than Climate Science.. and, well, there's that whole Nobel Peace Prize thing.. Never mind.
Organization? You must be joking..
That would be pretty much the entire Republican party. Here's Ron Paul explaining exactly what would happen, in 2002. This is six years before the collapse:..
Ah, so the Republicans knew about it and did nothing even though they controled Congress AND the Whitehouse at the time (01 - 08).
That makes it official: the Republicans are at fault for the collapse.
"Hey let me spew my totally unrelated ideology a bit!"
No thanks fuck off
Now we have a new reason for calling economics the dismal science
In personality tests, a common statement to be evalued is: "Facts speak for themselves" followed by "Facts frequently require interpretation". There is a need to define what the relevant data are as well as agreed practices to interpretation.
Obviously. I'm just saying that each of those things probably shouldn't be done by the same person.
Break up the responsibilities such that each is carried out by someone that is only judged by the quality of that task.
So the person that collects data will only be judged by the quality and amount of their data.
The person analyzing the data should only be judged on their analysis of the data.
The person that stores, sorts, and retrieves data should only be judged on that task.
Break it up at least into three groups.
That way the data collectors are not biased by the thesis of the analysts and the archivists are not biased by the needs of the analysts.
In both cases the corruption seems to spring from the analysts so they should have as little control over the information as possible. They should be able to request information be collected and to retrieve that information from stores at will.
however, they should not be able to bias the information collectors with their thesis or cause the information archivists to hide, destroy, or otherwise obscure information.
We've seen this lately with some frequency.
Favorable data is invented rather then recorded and unfavorable data is destroyed or lost.
It should not be possible for the analysts to create favorable data and it should not be possible for them to destroy unfavorable data.
They shouldn't control the information at all.
I've decided to stop wasting my time responding to AC trolls/sockpuppets... so if you want a response from me... login.
That's still judging the adjustments on your perception of bias by the scientists. Read and understand the papers that describe the reasons and means for the adjustments. Then we can have a reasonable conversation.
This is rubbish. Economics demonstrates that when there are high stakes involved, some scientists will prostitute themselves, insuring that their conclusions meet the desires of their masters. And they have no trouble coming up with plausible excuses such as your above "reasons and means for the adjustments".
I believe there is a strong correlation between economic ignorance and the belief that we must do something about climate change. The first paragraph is part of the reason why.
When people actually have experience with economics, they realize two things. First, that there actually are scientifically valid aspects to economics, such as the "law" of supply and demand, which are just as solidly demonstrated even by the standards of say, physics.
Second, that economics is not just frequently, but routinely and normally overwhelmed by conflicts of interest. There are way too many cases of things assumed to work merely because it is in the interest of the relevant parties to act on that assumption.
It sounds as if you think climate models are merely numerical exercises in curve fitting rather than models of the actual physical interactions that occur in the climate.
And you should be worried about that as well.
So far models are accurate within the expectations the modelers have for them.
My expectations count more to me than the modelers' expectations. They aren't accurate to within my expectations.
Economics has a huge problem here in spades. Expectations are a conveniently amorphous thing. I doubt that there are many economic models (most particularly, the blatantly dishonest ones) for which modeler expectations aren't being met. That doesn't make the model not actively baneful.
Calling economics, psychology, and other similar stuff "science" gives real science a bad name.
Actually, that common misconception is...a misconception.
Cotton production in the South almost doubled between 1850 and 1870, and more than doubled again by 1900.
And that in spite of the more obvious economic damage (railroads destroyed, workers killed, that sort of thing).
"I do not agree with what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it"
Economists are among the few who actually perform proper risk/reward calculations. And in studies, among the very few who behave entirely, though rationally, selfishly. If they can get away with it, and survive the consequences if they don't, they will do it.
economists are not scientists.
economics is not a science as we commonly accept the word.
it is a behavioural science, which by nature incorporates a large measure of unpredictibilty and irrationality, because it by default deals with human behaviour.
As for GW: Not only have the models successfully reproduce all historical data since 1900, but the actual results of the past several years have continually been within the predictions of the models. So I dont know what your expectations are, but we've covered this many times and I expect your expectations are neither realistic, nor relevent. They are accurate to actual climate scientists expectations (though they naturally continually work to refine them, to narrow that margin of error), and you aren't one.
The guy who said the election was rigged won the presidency with the second-most votes.
http://www.skepticalscience.co...
http://www.skepticalscience.co...
http://www.skepticalscience.co...
The guy who said the election was rigged won the presidency with the second-most votes.
Never trust an economist, until you've checked his math. Even then, you don't trust him. You've got to understand economics so well that you can recognize his base assumptions from his math, or you're still not qualified to check his math.
You could say the same about almost any profession involving predictive models, particularly those involving human behavior or chaotic systems. (economics involves both) I used to make statistical models of factory operations. I had a manager once ask me to list the assumptions in my model. He asked me to stop when I got to the third page of (single spaced) assumptions built into the model. As the saying goes, "All models are wrong. Some models are useful". Plenty of economic models are useful as long as you understand and respect the assumptions in the model.
Remember the collapse from the housing bubble burst? Who predicted that?
I can introduce you to people who were publicly predicting it as far back as 2003. People I know personally, some of whom are economics professors and some others who are investment managers. They couldn't tell you when the bubble would burst or precisely how bad the fallout would be but they could tell you it was VERY likely and they could give you a pretty good overview of the range of possible outcomes.
Precious few men and women knew it was coming, and damned near none had any idea how bad it could be.
Not true. Quite a few people including plenty of economists suspected some sort of bubble burst was coming and they could tell you the possible range of outcomes. The problem was that it was damn near impossible to predict WHEN it would burst and as a result it was impossible to predict the collateral damage and fallout. It's also impossible to predict specific decisions. The government could have chosen to bail out Lehman Brothers but for various reasons that seemed good at the time chose not to. (mostly due to wanting to avoid moral hazard) It's difficult, bordering on impossible, to predict specific actions with that level of specificity. Most economic models are statistical and tend to break down when you get to specific decisions. Events like the crash in 2008-9 are chaotic events and thus are very hard to predict with great specificity ahead of time since you don't know the starting conditions even if everything afterwards behaves rationally (which never happens).
Except certain approaches, for instance Keynsian, actually have a track record of success in the 20th century.
Look at the track record some time. Keynesian economics is popular, not because it works, but because it's an easy and legal way to steal lots of public funds.
Poppy cock. Krugman, probably the most well-known Keynsian, was shouting from the roof tops from 2001-2007 that the US was spending too much, cutting taxes too much, and generally fucking over their finances. Then in 2008-present he was saying that spending was needed. This is consistent with Keynesian economics.
In a nutshell, Keynesian principles state: when the economy is running fine, government should get out of the way, let the supply-demand market forces work, and minimize debt to a reasonable level (say 30% of GDP). When the economy is in the shitter, government/s should step in and create demand via stimulus packages to get people working. Once the economy picks up (i.e., there is a need to raise interest rates to cool things down), stimulus should be withdrawn and government/s go back to staying out of the way.
Keynesianism is not "spend all the time, regardless of economic conditions". That is a straw man which is trotted out on a semi-regular basis (as above). Can you please give a link/citation/reference to the (Keynesian) economist that has stated what you have stated?
All the supply-side, business-cycle, and Austrian folks have making all sorts of dire predictions since 2008, none of which have been coming true. Krugman and others have been making predictions too (e.g., no inflation even though the US has been 'printing money' because of the zero-bound interest rates), and they've been shown to be correct these past few years. Keynesianism works: it makes accurate predictions.
Who needs astrologers when we have computer models?
We probably need some sort of government program to retrain astrologers faced with technical obsolesence as network administrators of C++ programmers.
You can't see ANYTHING from a car, You've got to get out of the goddamned contraption and walk...Edward Abbey
Economy as such is not a science.
What is science? Observing phenomenon, making a model which can explain current behavior and predictions about future behavior, then seeing if that future behaviour matches the prediction.
All the supply-side, business-cycle, and Austrian folks have making all sorts of dire predictions since 2008, none of which have been coming true.
Krugman and other Keynesian econs have been making predictions too (e.g., no inflation even though the US has been 'printing money' because of the zero-bound interest rates), and they've been shown to be correct these past few years.
Ta-da! Science!
Just because the right wing gold bugs from Fox News ignore the results doesn't mean they're not there.
Any theory of economics that assumes things dramatically at odds with reality (eg rational actors, perfect information, fair behavior, etc) is utterly useless when applied to reality.
Incorrect. Many models, including many that have justifiably won Nobel prizes, are extremely useful with the caveat that you need to know and understand the underlying assumptions and limits to the model. You get into trouble when you start using models to predict things that do not fit the underlying conditions of the model. It's ok to presume rational actors and perfect information for a model so long as you don't use that model in conditions where those things don't apply.
Unfortunately sometimes the best models we currently have aren't robust enough to account for all the real world conditions so we necessarily use them in ways that might not be ideal. For instance most stock options are priced using the Black-Scholes equation which won a Nobel prize in 1997. It's brilliant and hugely insightful but it has a large number of assumptions which do not apply to many of the securities that are priced with the model. This doesn't make it useless but it does mean that anyone who uses it for securities that do not fit the assumption profile are taking on additional risk - sometimes substantial amounts of risk.
Thankfully physics has gotten rather far beyond such toy models, hopefully economics will get there too.
Most of physics doesn't involve chaotic systems and human behavior. You're comparing apples to oranges here. I've got a masters degree in finance but my undergraduate degree is in engineering with a minor in applied physics. I've worked as a researcher and as someone who builds financial models. Building and testing models in physics is in a lot of ways hugely more straightforward. I don't think many people here really appreciate how sophisticated a lot of financial models are. But the systems being modeled aren't so easy (for lack of a better word) to tease apart. Predicting economic outcomes is rather like predicting the weather if human emotions could cause hurricanes. It's a chaotic system with imperfect information and irrational actors.
So, how about them commercial economists?
...are Attention Whores, too. They want to sell you their pet idea and don't have the greatness to admit the limits of their apporach.
For example: Garbage Collection. Where can I find a paper in which some "scientist" admits that refcounting and destructors are actually useful in a few situations. The academic mafia has decided GC is the only proper way to do memory management and they go great lengths to explain why this is the only HALAL way to do it.
And that is of course just one example.
Another one would be "Artificial Intelligence" and their claims of eclipsing human intelligence by something like 2001. So, whores wherever you look. A world of whores, actually.
Is economics considered a science now? I thought it was one of those "soft sciences" or like sociology, psychology, or medicine where it's not practiced with any rigor, and nobody trusts it anyway.
Speaking scientifically, NOBODY understands nonlinear systems with moderate amounts of feedback, as soon as you have about 10 or more nonlinear elements (e.g. transistors).
BRAINS are 100 BILLION non-linear elements with even more feedback links (something like 10000 per Neuron). So, speaking as an electrical engineer or as a mathematician, this is a completely opaque system.
Now, put a few billions of these systems on a planet, have them interact and then make some wild mathematical claims about their "rational" behaviour. THAT is Economics.
Auf Deutsch. Hokus-Pokus "science".
It's like asking how often does the police takes bribes or how often a politic is corrupt.
The democrats held the Senate 2001-2003 and 2007-2009.
economists are not scientists.
That's your ignorance speaking. It is a methodical study of a field and is subject to empirical observation just like any other field of science.
it is a behavioural science, which by nature incorporates a large measure of unpredictibilty and irrationality, because it by default deals with human behaviour.
It is mostly certainly not just a behavioral science. The parties to the economy don't even need to be sentient in order for the models to work.
As for GW: Not only have the models successfully reproduce all historical data since 1900
Idiotic. It's not hard to create a model which fits past data and yet has no predictive ability.
but the actual results of the past several years have continually been within the predictions of the models.
Only if your expectations are low enough that you can ignore the consistent undershooting of these models. Recall I wrote:
I doubt that there are many economic models (most particularly, the blatantly dishonest ones) for which modeler expectations aren't being met. That doesn't make the model not actively baneful.
I don't want models that meet your shitty expectations. I want models that accurately model the Earth's future climate.
They never just look at the real world temperature records or precipitation records and say "Let's tweak this to make it fit the curve better."
Yes, of course they do. That's the sort of thing I'm complaining about. Papers with titles about adjusting radiative forcing parameters to account for real world temperatures and whatnot.
Climate models are projecting 30 year trends so it takes that long to totally test them
It used to be "10 years", but the 10-year predictions missed. Then it was "15 years", but the 15-year predictions missed. Now it's "give me money for my whole career, and I promise I'll be right in the end". Pardon my skepticism.
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
"it is a behavioural science, which by nature incorporates a large measure of unpredictibilty and irrationality, because it by default deals with human behaviour."
You need to check that premise. The assumption upon which most scientific progress has been built is that anything which appears to be unpredictable and irrational will eventually resolve as rational and predictable once properly understood. Even chaos math and quantum physics exist within and because of that assumption. As does Psychology, Sociology, Economics, and so forth.
If that assumption were to actually be proven false for any single field (as you appear to believe has happened?) that would really be a quite powerful blow against the scientific worldview itself.
=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-
Friends don't let friends enable ecmascript.
First, this isn't terribly surprising on some levels given the profession's bias for papers with positive results (i.e. where the data shows something), especially given the disciplines overly heavy focus of on and praise of individualistic decision making; it helps their career and only hurts others if they don't get caught, so seems strategically appealing. Personally, I think individual decision making is a BS model of the real world and is a dangerous thing to teach.
Second, even if they weren't fucking up on purpose, the economic method in its canonical state is fundamentally broken. Economists essentially build quantitative models and then either optimize them to make "good" decisions (e.g. for policy or business strategy recommendations), or assume the agents under academic study are themselves optimizing along the quantitative components of the model so that tests can be run to see if real life data reflects this "optimal" behavior. The problem is that life is fundamentally qualitative, not quantitative, and there are things of tremendous value (e.g. love, friendship, emotional well-being, employee satisfaction) that are complex analog creatures which are impossible to quantify accurately. These kinds of things get ignored in economists' quantitative models, and when the numbers are optimized, they are often done so at great cost to important qualitative sources of value. Anyone who's worked at a big company has probably experienced this, treated as a cog in an optimizing equation rather than a human being employed by other humans, where they destroy morale, loyalty, and the emotional well-being of their employees because some idiot with an MBA and a labor model predicted that revised vacation policies could increase profits by 0.5%.
I love economics in theory, but it's standard practice is in a very dangerous state right now, and there's so much institutional drag that the majority of economists don't see the problems and are too arrogant to revise their way of thinking. I have to argue that emotions are a source of value every fucking day in my department, like the amount of money people spend on therapy, or the importance people give to objects with sentimental value aren't some indication. Economists understand value is fundamentally subjective, which is why we have concepts like an individual's "willingness to pay". Well, my emotions, hard to quantify as they are, have tremendous subjective value to me and I am part of the economy, so emotions have value in the economy. QED.
Yes, that's how the money supply works. Printing more of it means the existing supply is devalued. Or have you been reading Bernanke's book lately? If you can't understand such a basic concept, it's no wonder why those in charge are being allowed to run rampant.
Whether you like it or not, here's what science is, basically:
Any field that makes logical use of empirical information to adjudicate between claims and make predictions is a science. (All of the terms there are used very broadly--e.g, "logical" could mean quantitative or mathematical; "predictions" could be similarly broadly defined).
Something isn't scientific or not because of what is studied, it's scientific or not because of *how* it's studied. So if someone collects data on economic patterns and uses quantitative models of that data to adjudicate between theories, it's a science.
The real dilemma facing society is whether we choose to base our arguments on reasoned empiricism or not. If you cede lack of reasoned empiricism to others because of the domain being discussed, you're basically sacrificing science in order to maintain a flawed radical reductionism.
It's like arguing that Haskell can't be used for "real" computer science because it doesn't involve transistors.
My expectations count more to me than the modelers' expectations. They aren't accurate to within my expectations.
Scientists expectations are based on their knowledge of the uncertainty they have to deal with. What are your expectations base on?
Economics like the statistics it is based on are pseudo science. By manipulating statistics anything can be "proven". According to them this is not misconduct it is "statistical analysis".
They never just look at the real world temperature records or precipitation records and say "Let's tweak this to make it fit the curve better."
Yes, of course they do. That's the sort of thing I'm complaining about. Papers with titles about adjusting radiative forcing parameters to account for real world temperatures and whatnot.
Perhaps you have some real examples of this. I'd be interested in seeing them but I doubt they say what you think they say.
Climate models are projecting 30 year trends so it takes that long to totally test them
It used to be "10 years", but the 10-year predictions missed. Then it was "15 years", but the 15-year predictions missed. Now it's "give me money for my whole career, and I promise I'll be right in the end". Pardon my skepticism.
The standard period of 30 years for climate statistics was defined by the World Meteorological Organization a long time ago. Climate modelling has always worked on that basis. Again, can you show examples global climate models that explicitly used 10 or 15 year year projections?
Huh. The only 'scientifically valid' law that relates to economic theory is Murphy's Law.
Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!
Economics data is a subset of historical data. That data allows correlations between factors, events in the past, but can never determine cause-and-effect relationships.
Without C&E, no science, no predictions.
We don't expect historians to tell us much about the future. All they can do is select historical episodes that are similar to the current time and the subsequent events. They know, and any rational person understands, that the past does not predict the future, that there are many, many differences between historical examples, and it is a hypothesis that the situations are meaningfully comparable.
'Witchdoctors with spreadsheets', not 'scientists predicting from sound theory'.
Medicine isn't far behind. People have been complaining about this for years. It is bad/misused stats. The null hypothesis needs to be predicted by your theory. When people use the opposite the logic is messed up, yet this method has been spreading like a disease from educational research, to psychology, to the social sciences, to medicine/biology, and most recently to the historically better sciences of physics and astronomy. I do not know about chemistry.
Medicine and economics have some interesting similarities. They both rely heavily on statistical models since direct experimentation is either impossible or just Frowned Upon. Their practitioners almost uniformly don't really understand statistics (does anyone?). There is a lot of money riding on the outcome and for some odd reason, people seem to think that medicine and economics are important.
The big mistake that economists made is not to offer a special advanced degree in the field. Instead of 'Medical Doctor' they should have had schools devoted to "Doctor Of Outmost Money" or something like that.
Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!
Scientists expectations are based on their knowledge of the uncertainty they have to deal with.
It is worth noting that these uncertainties only get mentioned when failure needs to be excused. For example, where is the discussion of the factor of three difference between low and high estimates for the global mean temperature forcing of a double of atmospheric CO2?
What are your expectations base on?
Accurately modeling climate phenomena over the next few decades.
Austrian-school Economists don't have this issue at all. They avoid it entirely in fact by the simple expedient of expressing disbelief in the scientific testability of Economics in the first place. To them, the only thing that can be relied on is pure logic. Thus any annoying data that might seem to show something they don't like is clearly a figment of your imagination. To them essentially economics is not a science at all, but rather a philosophy.
As such, starting with the right axioms and some clever inductive reasoning, an Austrian can prove any economic fact his funders want him to. Not so coincidentally, the Koch brothers are big believers, and have funded entire departments with the proviso that they teach only this school.
So if you don't like scientific dishonesty, the solution is clear: Go Austrian and get rid of the science entirely!
Uncertainties are always mentioned in the scientific papers. They are often left out in main stream journalism in the interest of simplifying the reporting.
What are your expectations base on?
Accurately modeling climate phenomena over the next few decades.
That's a non-answer. The answer has to be based on the physical limitations of the field you are studying.
Speaking scientifically, NOBODY understands nonlinear systems with moderate amounts of feedback, as soon as you have about 10 or more nonlinear elements (e.g. transistors). BRAINS are 100 BILLION non-linear elements with even more feedback links (something like 10000 per Neuron). So, speaking as an electrical engineer or as a mathematician, this is a completely opaque system.
Now, put a few billions of these systems on a planet, have them interact and then make some wild mathematical claims about their "rational" behaviour. THAT is Economics.
Auf Deutsch. Hokus-Pokus "science".
There's a reason that there is no Nobel prize for Economics....and it's that it's not a recognized science.
Truth is like the sun. You can shut it out for a time, but it ain't goin' away. - Elvis Presley (source: imdb.com)
They are often left out in main stream journalism in the interest of simplifying the reporting.
Such as the IPCC executive summaries? Or certain climatologists testimonies to legislatures?
That's a non-answer. The answer has to be based on the physical limitations of the field you are studying.
If the field is physically limited so that it can't ever generate predictions that meet my expectations, then it is useless for use by me in prediction. I don't believe climatology qualifies. Instead I think instead this is another poor excuse for not doing due diligence before spreading FUD about climate change.
Not only have the models successfully reproduce all historical data since 1900, but the actual results of the past several years have continually been within the predictions of the models.
The models are wrong.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
Ok, this seems obvious, but was this paper written by an economist? If yes, how can we trust a paper from a group of people that is so willing to cheat? (of course if he cheated then economists are honest and so the paper is good...)
It should be noted the the Nobel prize in economics was invented by a bunch of economists that thought such a thing should exist.
It is separate from the other Nobels. Sharing only a name. Administratively it is run by an independent group.
To their credit: Sociologists, Psychologists, Astrologers and other 'scientists' haven't funded their own Nobels...yet.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
It should be noted the the Nobel prize in economics was invented by a bunch of economists that thought such a thing should exist.
It is separate from the other Nobels. Sharing only a name. Administratively it is run by an independent group.
To their credit: Sociologists, Psychologists, Astrologers and other 'scientists' haven't funded their own Nobels...yet.
It is also not officially a Nobel prize.
Truth is like the sun. You can shut it out for a time, but it ain't goin' away. - Elvis Presley (source: imdb.com)
Economics doesn't demonstrate that there are corrupt scientists, history does. Do you have an example of an overwhelming majority of scientists in a field who were corrupt? AFAICT, that would be unprecedented. Hence, your claim is extraordinary, and requires extraordinary evidence.
"When you have eliminated the unacceptable, whatever is left, however improbable, must be the truthiness" - Holmes
Slavery is a local maximum. It's a terrible economic system that holds nations back.
Of course that means the blacks did NOT build the south, much less the USA. So it can't be said in public.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
Actually, many astrologers learn a whole lot of stuff, so they're not necessarily the ones making stuff up. They have an intellectual framework that they work in. It differs from a scientific framework in that (a) I never could find any good foundations, aside from somebody earlier making stuff up, and (b) it doesn't appear to work better than chance in controlled experiments.
"When you have eliminated the unacceptable, whatever is left, however improbable, must be the truthiness" - Holmes
Physics, Chemistry, Medicine, Literature, Peace, and Economic Science are all listed on the official site...
This issue is a bit more complicated than you think.
No, quantum physics does not claim to know (or that it will ever know) why a particle collapses to one of two states when measured. It is not assumed that there is a rational explanation why.
Quantum physicists have questioned the scientific worldview. From wikipedia: "for objects governed by the laws of quantum mechanics, like photons and electrons, it may make no sense to think of them as having well defined characteristics. Instead, what we see may depend on how we look."
Hey, no worries. In another 30 years, I'll have no objections whatsoever to climate change science no all the politics it's driving. (Also, I'll be dead, but that's mere coincidence.)
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
What you're saying is your Bayesian prior probability is 1, so no amount of evidence will convince you (see Cromwell's rule)?
Even the Austrian school criticizes the quantity theory of money.
Economics doesn't demonstrate that there are corrupt scientists, history does.
More accurately the history of economics.
Do you have an example of an overwhelming majority of scientists in a field who were corrupt?
Economics.
Hence, your claim is extraordinary, and requires extraordinary evidence.
Which is readily provided by a study of the history of economics.
IPCC executive summaries are just that. Simplifications of the main reports where uncertainty is expressed in ranges of how likely or unlikely something is.
Your expectations only yours. They have no bearing on the expectations that scientific uncertainty brings.
Wait, are you one of those economists that are the subject of this article?
The figures I found indicate the US by 1876 still hadn't produced the same cotton it had in 1860: http://www.sailsinc.org/durfee...
Note also how you cleverly cite a figure from 1850 to 1870, which includes the Civil War. Most of the "doubling" took place before 1860, thanks to the (enforced) productivity of slaves.
From http://www.history.upenn.edu/e...:
That productivity was not matched by post-war cotton producers. Capitalism is best when it is immoral and doesn't respect unalienable rights.
Yes, if I'm lucky enough live another 30 years I'll be 92. But even in the short term temperatures are still within the uncertainty ranges of climate models and until they drop out of that range for a few years I'll continue think the models are doing ok.
There's been no warming for 17 years. My "global warming is a hoax" model is also still within it's uncertainty range. I'll be the first to admit it's a crappy model, but hey, it's equally as predictive and that's what matters to science.
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
The world is already doing something about climate change -- by contributing to it. To say we should not do anything about climate change is to say we should cease to exist.
"No warming" is overstating it. Surface temperatures certainly have slowed down compared to 1998 but that was an outlier year with an extreme El Nino. If you throw that outlier year out (or take the average between the preceding and following year) it still looks like warming. (Picking an outlier value to start your series with is commonly known as cherry picking.) On top of that you can't ignore the heat stored in the oceans and that hasn't slowed down at all.
So your "global warming is a hoax model" has 13 more years to go before it fits in standard climatology. We'll see what happens.
WHOOSH!
Look at the RSS Data. The satellite data fits the null hypothesis well enough. It's only with the "adjustments" to the land stations that you get pronounced warming over the past 100 years. (You can cherry pick your own data set for entertainment, but it's far less alarming than the BS land data in any case.)
But the interesting point isn't really is the Earth warming - certainly at some time scale it is. The interesting point isn't how much is human activity affecting this, vs the normal climate cycle (which I'm not believing anyone on till the models accurately predict divergence form the null hypothesis). The interesting question is do we want it warmer or colder. Funny how the left mostly lives on the coasts, where warming is more threatening (well, I'm in Seattle, and so I'm screwed either way - the glaciers were quite a bit south of here last time around IIRC).
On top of that you can't ignore the heat stored in the oceans and that hasn't slowed down at all.
Is that heat we can't measure, but must be stored in the oceans otherwise we'd be wrong?
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
Economist/Economics is an Arts/Humanities specialty; So, They economist are not scientist, engineers, doctors ....
In the USA/EU to hold business/economics "professionals" to a code of conduct/ethics/professional legal strictures is like considering a nude picture a misconduct by an artist.
Unaccountable leaders are masters, and unrepresented people are slaves. How do US and EU fare?
Having read the paper about widespread use of questionable data practices, for some reason I'm wondering whether I should trust the authors' data . . .
I cannot recall the name of the book in which John K Galbraith wrote that he and other academics at Harvard failed a Ph D student because he wrote that lack of demand was the cause of the 1929 Wall Street crash. In 1936 or thereabouts John K Galbraith read Keynes's book that lack of demand caused the 1929 Wall Street crash and he became a committed Keynesian.
Misconduct? Misunderstanding? Misapplying trust to someone of stature rather than his own lying eyes?
You pays your money you take your pick.
The world is already doing something about climate change -- by contributing to it.
I don't think that contributes to the discussion at all. Even our non-existence wouldn't stabilize climate.
By "doing nothing", I mean that we don't try to restrain our activities and impose huge burdens on society just to stay within a narrow band centered on the climate of 1850. I still advocate monitoring the Earth's climate in case I happen to be wrong on the degree of effect of AGW as well as adapting to any climate changes that do happen.
A worthless study with worthless results.
Not to mention behind a paywall.
Without public access, we can't evaluate the study for competence or professionalism. Further, no information seems to be available on who provided the funding for this "result".
There are many groups that would find it convenient to attack economics as a science in order to advance particular agendas (especially those agendas economists have criticised as being impractical).
In short, the study has no more scientific validity than a religious text such as the Bible. It is scientifically worthless. You might as well claim that your God or Gods told you that economics was bad.
There are large numbers of studies routinely done by economists that are done using the scientific method, have good results, and are reproducible within reasonable limits. There are clear hypothesis, there are well defined measurements, and the limits on the results are honestly and accurately discussed. Go read a few journals to see this.
For that matter, economic history has been a respected and extremely important part of history for a long time now. It is the work of the economists that has made this possible, as much as the historians.
Interesting to see how many people here don't care about any sort of rational or evidence based examination of economics as a whole. and simply want to use the publication of this purported "result" to spew hatred.
Every sufficiently large group of people has a few bad apples (we don't know that the "study" found them, of course, since we don't really know anything about it) but only an idiot attacks a large group on the basis of misconduct by a few.
Is Slashdot news for nerds, or news for idiots?
My Bayesian prior isn't 1, but it's pretty darn close in some things. In the case of a corrupt field of science, I'd have to see a lot of good evidence to believe, not the rather common complaint that the scientists aren't finding stuff the complainer wants them to find.
"When you have eliminated the unacceptable, whatever is left, however improbable, must be the truthiness" - Holmes