Even Keynes was guessing. Just because he seems to have been mostly right doesn’t make it science.
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If you went to college more recently or read some of the Dan Ariely books, you might have learned about a branch of economics that is as empirical as anthropology - behavioral economics.
The knowledge that economics as a whole doesn’t work very well is known to economists, and the ones not pushing an agenda have been working on ideas to make it better.
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indeed, not . . . rocket . . . science
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“To economists, the real world is often a special case.” - Edgar Feidler
Curiously one of the many (bullshit) foundational assumptions of the current model is that people are completely informed of all products and prices.
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Graeber’s scholarship in that book is impeccable: “Apple Computers is a famous example: it was founded by (mostly Republican) computer engineers who broke from IBM in Silicon Valley in the 1980s, forming little democratic circles of twenty to forty people with their laptops in each other’s garages.”
(Yes, I know he claims that this was just a minor mistake like a typo or something but honestly, how could a sentence be that wrong on all particulars?)
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And yet still not a hard science.
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This.
Anthropology attempts to study cultures as they are.
Economics is completely predicated on a system that enforces the very things that they claim to be observing.
Sociology, insofar as they sometimes make policy prescriptions based on their results, is a closer analogy than anthropology, but it is still a less extreme case of it than economics.
Anthropologists are also much less prone to try to make grand unified theories out of results that don’t justify them than economists. They are usually content to just be empiricists if their data don’t justify a theoretical perspective.
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Some time ago, I remember hearing:
There’s a volcano waiting to erupt in the Pacific Rim. Its name: medium-term convertible debentures.
Could you explain?
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I’ll just leave this old Chicago School of economics joke here:
How many economeists does it take to change a light bulb?
None. Had the light bulb needed changing, the free hand of the the market would have already done so.
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We live in a world built by Milton Friedman and F.A. Hayak. Both spun simple, charismatic narratives about how economics worked. Both were ideological charlatans.
They posed simple answers to open ended complex dilemmas and both were rewarded and applauded by the wealthy elite who used their rigorous intellectual offerings to swindle the globe.
None of it was based on any, ANY kind of scientific inquiry. It was all bullshit, built upon ideology that would serve consolidated power and was supported by the same . In other words, the economic world we live in is a wonderland made for sociopaths, hustlers, and inherited wealth to plunder and it’s all covered with an enticing body suit that is simple, sexy, full of injected curves, and designed to obfuscate.
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Anthropology is several different things. Certainly the hard-core physical anthropology digging up fossils of hominids and the like is real science – basically evolutionary biology, but the cultural stuff Margaret Mead and like did and do is much more questionable. Many universities even have separate departments for the different kinds of anthropology.
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I was talking about cultural anthropology, not physical.
My point isn’t that they are always right, it’s that they are honestly attempting disinterested observation, and don’t often try to create grand overarching theories of human culture on flimsy evidence.
Not often is not to say never, since the popular (For a while) “tabula rasa” take on nature vs nurture was just such an unfounded theory, but much better than economics.
Mead’s problem was not that she wasn’t honestly trying to be a disinterested observer, it’s that her subjects were playing an elaborate, years-long joke on her. Humans are hard to study.
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As others here have said, Econ is at best a social science- it’s trying its best to map ideas on to large data sets, but has no falsifiability or predictive theories.
However- while I mainly agree with Cory on the headline, I have to disagree with his characterization that there is some scrappy unappreciated group out there that does have all the answers. Nonsense. Yes, you can find Some Guy™ who predicted any particular crash, but nobody is consistently right in this field. That’s never something that bodes well for a field.
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So where are those 100 people with their amazing knowledge and powerful predictive theories that can allow us to set policy rationally? Because the world sure could use them.
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Except Mead and others were students of Franz Boas, who was attempting to counter the scienctific racism of the era, which assumed that it was scientifically provable that white men were superior to the rest of humanity, and that the ONLY proper way to live life was along the lines of European society, which bolstered the argument for colonialism, which was the violent and destructive imposition of European values on the rest of humanity. Instead Boas and his students argued from a much more nuanced position that each society had it’s own positives and negatives which were valid for their society. We do know that eugenics and the belief in race ended up in mass murder. We also know that Boas and his students contributed the idea that culture is not genetic destiny, which was the mainstream thought of the day, but was instead relative to its context, and that western culture was not the only valid culture.
But, sure, Mead’s the bad guy here…
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It’s not about whether Mead was a good or bad person, but whether or not her work was really on a scientific level (it certainly wasn’t on the level of the Leakleys at least). It’s also worth remembering that most cases of “scientific racism” like eugenics were largely supported by non-scientists and it was actually scientists like Reginald Punnet who disproved it, not through political rhetoric but by showing that even if you could show that a negative trait was genetic, it would likely be a recessive trait that would be nearly impossible to eliminate even if all people having the trait didn’t have children.
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There’s definitely a few funky parts in “Debt” but I would still recommend it to everyone. The historical/anthropological context offered in the first two-thirds of that book were of more value to me than all my formal economics/commerce lessons combined!
This claim is saying something too because I still use my formal economics schooling (all the jargon definitions and consumer rights legislation I memorized) to navigate life every single day. Hell, I still imagine demand/supply graphs moving when I hear variables change in the news!
But that book was especially interesting and illuminating for me. It introduced new perspectives, contexts, and case-studies I had never encountered before and it was fascinating to learn more about the plurality of human systems of debt and obligation.
It also helped challenge and correct a number of serious misconceptions I had inherited from authority figures back in my pre-critical-faculties-days. This is something I’m always grateful for!
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I think we can all agree that there is work worth doing that is not scientific. Full stop.
Tell that to all the universities that had eugenics departments.
Boas and his group were part of that, too. As were historians and sociologists like WEB Dubois.
Yet there are STILL people today who believe in the “science” of eugenics and white racial superiority, and are fighting for it. Mean while, we keep destroying funding and support for the humanities and social sciences which, often with the help of people who believe that any form of knowledge that isn’t strictly based on science or able to line the pockets of some corporations is worthless and should not be taught at the university level. That is dangerous, because the humanities and social sciences are valuable means of understanding the world and other people.
No one would suggest that cultural anthropology is the same kind of knowledge as science, largely because of the work of people like Mead, who provided a valuable service in helping us to understand that other human beings who don’t look like us, talk like us, or have the same value system as us are human beings too, and worthy of the exact same freedoms we hope to enjoy, and in fact might have some valuable insights to offer us about life.
Like it or not, science can’t do everything.
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