Press conference: https://www.youtube.com/live/EajZObplJ8U
https://www.reuters.com/world/mokyr-aghion-howitt-win-2025-n... - includes quotes from press conference, including commentary from laureates on present geopolitical climate
> Technology advances rapidly and affects us all, with new products and production methods replacing old ones in a never-ending cycle. This is the basis for sustained economic growth, which results in a better standard of living, health and quality of life for people around the globe.
> However, this was not always the case. Quite the opposite – stagnation was the norm throughout most of human history. Despite important discoveries now and again, which sometimes led to improved living conditions and higher incomes, growth always eventually levelled off.
...
Neo-Malthusianism is as bunk as Malthusianism was
...to produce the same output. Growth requires greater output though.
Just look at the timeline of energy consumption [0]. Either you're wrong and innovation requires more resources, or you're right and there's no direct relation between innovation and overall resource usage.
[0] https://ourworldindata.org/energy-production-consumption
[1] https://yearbook.enerdata.net/total-energy/world-energy-inte...
I'm not sure that's what I was looking for though. That's unit consumption per GDP, so it may look stable or even declining regardless of actual consumption of resources.
In a way, it indicates the potential for a more sustainable living but unless it goes down by greater amounts than GDP growth, it's still net positive environmental damage.
Sure. Link in population and living standards and you start to get a toy model that dispels the notion that all growth must be about consumption. (A palette of iPhones represents growth from mainframes of equal mass and energy consumption.)
We know this to be false given the number of civilisations that depleted their soil due because they didn’t know (or care) about crop rotation. Stable-state economies which nevertheless collapsed because they missed a key technology.
We've probably yet to even come close to that eden-like experience.
since the end of the 19th century...
Am I missing something?
How can they assert that the current trajectory of economic growth won't end in stagnation, like every other growth spurt throughout history?
Sure, the economic growth of the last 150 years is unprecedented in history. But so was the second most significant period of economic growth before it stagnated.
Straw man. Nobody argues this.
> sustained economic growth
Is it really such an unreasonable reading?
It's reasonable but unnecessarily reductive. Particulalry when TFA is linked above.
Capital is not simply "anything that I can tie to improving my work output".
We could then go a step or two forward and posit that a sick populace means a sick consumer class means reduced demand for goods that generate growth, but those are just details.
Think about the components of all those innovations from the past and if they would have been possible (to scale) without violent and forcible extraction of resources from around the globe, incl forced labor.
Think about when GDP was constructed and how, and from which point stuff got counted into it (ie from which point in the production chain it added to a country´s gdp). If you take raw materials X and Y from somewhere, by force and for cheap, then make sth like a out of it and only count that topline, now you have a big gdp, congrats.
Eg even the "US" was not even "settled" (forcible land expansion) until the late 19th or early 20th century. So you have a steady influx of cheap/free land to support a growing population that keeps adding to the "gdp". Lo and behold, soon after this dynamic stopped, financial bubble and bust ensues.
The main lesson for me is that progress and growth are completely separate things/concepts. You can absolutely progress without "growing" (bloating) your gdp, if you change some things. You can absolutely regress while "growing" (bloating) your gdp. Look at "US" today.
Chicken are coming home to roost. This is why first instinct of Trump and his cohorts is now to expand again "US" borders. Go back to extraction to "grow", since they are institutionally and mentally incapable of progress without extraction. More importantly, without "growth" the system as it is will collapse. It behaves like a cancer that has close to killed its host. It´s over, and anyone who can see knows it on some level.
Larger and bigger powers can control different parts of 'supply chain' (for lack of a better word) and make it difficult to progress without them getting a royalty. In their minds they are justified as they made progress first and others are simply copying their IP
It got rich domestically through industrialism. Then the newly rich countries went on to colonize the world, because now they could. If and how much the colonies made them even richer is debatable, but it was probably a net cost on average.
This is one of several insights counter to "common sense" that economists have figured out.
Note that industrialized countries without colonial empires ended up at least as rich as the big European colonial powers.
I haven't heard this before, do you have sources where I could learn more?
he's probably grasping to "research" from before the 30s, if even that, expect to ignore elites and focus on average country gdp nonsense.
Circumstancial evidence includes:
1. Having natural resources is often bad for development: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Resource_curse
2. Scotland is in the UK because it tried to do colonialism, bankrupted itself and had to sell itself to England.
2. Ireland and Finland are doing as well as any other European country but never colonized anyone and were themselves colonized.
Colonialism is basically just a distracting game countries played before economic growth was invented.
"Our hypothesis is that Atlantic trade—the opening of the sea routes to the New World, Africa, and Asia and the building of colonial empires—contributed to the process of West European growth between 1500 and 1850, not only through direct economic effects, but also indirectly by inducing fundamental institutional change."
https://scholar.harvard.edu/files/jrobinson/files/jr_AERAtla...
Where has he argued the opposite?
We didn't steal that wealth from Africa, in part because Africa had very little wealth.
I don't have a great link laying out this in more detail, but I know Johan Norberg has written and talked a fair amount about this.
Looking to the future, I'd prefer colonialism not be considered a lucrative strategy (though the thesis doesn't deny that colonialism was profitable for specific interest groups - just that those groups were a small part of the newly industrializing economies, and that the nation-level balance sheet gained little from their pillaging, compared to the costs of empire-maintenance).
Since you don't offer any evidence for this scenario, I can't really refute it :)
But note that 90% of Africa didn't even get colonized before 1884. That was over a century into the Industrial Revolution era, during which Western Europe had roughly doubled it's population and tripled their GDP.
I don't interpret the OP comment as restricted to Africa - e.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Encomienda in Spanish colonies.
I won't write an essay about it, but note that (1) Russia and Africa both have enormous natural resources and are very poor, and (2) Hong Kong and Singapore have no natural resources and are very rich.
This is just silly. Everywhere had forced labour, but didn't manage to build what the west did. The African slavers selling their fellow continent-dwellers didn't somehow manage to pick all the people who could build the most advanced things in the world at the time.
Oxford University was founded in 1096, long before what you're describing. This is very strong evidence that the UK has a thousand years of excellent investment in education, which much better explains all the advantages that built its empire, the good bits and bad. Its advances are in part due to the Roman colonisation, which allowed Britain to rediscover things that much more advanced civilisation had discovered 1000 years prior to that founding, and then push on to far greater heights.
There are entire countries that still wouldn't have universities today if left to their own devices. But they would still have slaves, because western powers wouldn't have ended this practice, either through Christianity or, if that didn't work, by force.
Other civilizations had great academic and scientific revolutions, much before Oxfordians did anything of note. Just look at the history of Indian, Chinese, Persian, and Arabic mathematics for a simple example, or Indian linguistic inquiry for another.
The romans did not discover anything the celts had built in the british isles; they largely existed in opposition to them.
I didn't say they didn't. The ancient Egyptians built the Pyramids, too. But that doesn't mean Egypt sustained that advantage and developed leading-edge science, values, and technology to the present day. They had a brief moment, and they are today in some ways a very cool country, but, as with most countries, they measure progress as "how far along the tech and culture trees we are compared to the West".
> The romans did not discover anything the celts had built in the british isles; they largely existed in opposition to them.
Maybe you should read my comment again tomorrow, with a clearer head.
> What racist and xenophobic BS.
A much clearer head.
But technological progress can be understood as successively more sophisticated ways of capturing and directing energy from natural processes. Economic growth has always occurred downstream of technologies that extract more energy or increase efficiency. Sheep, horses, windmills, coal, oil, nuclear ... etc.
Metrics like kWh per capita might become more interesting as the understanding of energy/growth matures. Or externally added energy (by electricity, oil, and fertiliser) per calorie of food.
To achieve growth while also reducing energy use, efficiency must be increased proportionately through technology. Electrification of transport (bc low thermodynamic efficiency of combustion engines) is an example of how we are doing this.
So even if technology continues to develop, unless efficiency grows faster than energy sources wane, there will only be economic degrowth.
Energy is a critical quantity in multiple subfields of economy including environmental economy where it's a core issue.
> He is best known today for his 1971 magnum opus The Entropy Law and the Economic Process, in which he argued that all natural resources are irreversibly degraded when put to use in economic activity. A progenitor and a paradigm founder in economics, Georgescu-Roegen's work was decisive for the establishing of ecological economics as an independent academic sub-discipline in economics.
And that's something which happens thousands of times per day all over the world in different businesses and in almost all human endeavour. We're constantly getting more and more utility out of the material and energy we use. So growth is both using more resources, as well as using them in better ways.
So lower standards of living.
Or is your definition of luxury "performative wasting of energy"? If so, the lower the tech that you have access to, the better for the rest of humanity. :(
Back in the early 2000's when I saw Pres. Bush on the TV, he would say something like, "... and they hate our way of life" and I assumed that had to do with our secular way of having different religions around or something.
As I get older, I realize that he was talking about the above quote.
An unexpected (to me!) prize but definitely a good one.
What’s notable is that mokyr’s research is very, very accessible to a layman. You can read his books and understand them nearly perfectly without needing substantial technical background. (Of course there’s a huge existing literature in economics and history he’s engaging with which you won’t know, but I’m not an economic historian either so a lot of it is unfamiliar to me too.). Try it! Hopefully you learn something.
Also the committee always releases a good non-technical summary of the laureates work and an even better “more technical” summary. You can start there for an overview.
As for the point which will be raised endlessly here that this is “not a real Nobel” - whatever. No one in the economics profession cares. Alfred Nobel doesn’t have a monopoly on prizes or priority to decide which fields are worth recognizing. It’s our highest prestige prize. Call it what you want.
Mokyr’s northwestern website has links to a lot of his papers.
An extremely crude selection rule:
Anything published in the American economic review, quarterly journal of economics, journal of political economy has the profession’s “highest stamp of approval”. It’s really hard to publish anything there. (There are two journals im not listing in that “top” category but he has no papers there on his website.). On aghion or howitts websites, look for the above journals but also econometrica and the review of economic studies. Those are the “top five” in the field.
There are surely papers in good history and Econ history journals on mokyr’s website but I don’t know the journals!
Standards for any chapter in a “handbook of X economics” or “handbook of the economics of X” are high - those should be good surveys.
Similarly a paper in the “annual review of economics”
Also mokyr has a bunch of work on Amazon. “The lever of riches” is a classic. “A culture of growth” is well regarded.
Finally he has a forthcoming book called “two paths to prosperity” with two other distinguished guys - one Econ historian (greif) and one political economy guy (tabellini). It’s coming out in about three weeks. Good timing, Princeton U Press!
Aghion and howitt have a growth textbook at the advanced undergrad level called “the economics of growth.”
They have a much more advanced work called “endogenous growth theory” which is for specialists (or at least anyone with first year PhD macro)
Aghion has a book called “the power of creative destruction.”
Another contradiction by a member of the economics profession. It seems to me they care very much. By linking the prize to Alfred Nobel’s name (and to the Nobel institutions), the Riksbank ensured the prize would immediately carry great symbolic prestige. The Nobel brand was already well established internationally, so adopting the name helped the economics prize gain recognition, gravitas, and legitimacy.
I’d love an estimate from you (or anyone) about the marginal effect on the profession’s “legitimacy” (which is what? and how’s it measured?) from having the prize include Nobel’s name vs. not including it.
Really we don’t care.
> I’d love an estimate from you (or anyone) about the marginal effect on the profession’s “legitimacy” (which is what? and how’s it measured?) from having the prize include Nobel’s name vs. not including it.
I don't have an estimate for that, but we have an estimate on how much money the Sverige Riskbank bankers were ready to spend in that effort. Maybe it didn't pan out but some people definitely had a multimillion dollar interest in making that happen. As an economist you must wonder what their incentives could have been …
I've seen this style of argument before and I think it's a non sequitur and total BS. The fact that he may care about feeling his opinion is being misrepresented is totally different from what his original "we don't care" statement referred to.
You’re mixing up quantitative finance and economics.
What do you base this on?
This is a bad model to pick to exemplify physics envy given it’s based on thermodynamic dispersion.
The term “physics envy” broadly applies to all social sciences lacking a mathematical basis. It’s a criticism of using math where it doesn’t belong. That hasn’t really fit (until very recently) with economics. It’s been a classic complaint about quantitative finance’s loftier visions of universality.
Using a model derived from physics is not having physics envy.
> The term “physics envy” broadly applies to all social sciences lacking a mathematical basis
No, physics envy is about thinking you can have the same prediction power as physics using simple mathematical tools just because some branch of physics do (while not understanding physics at the same time, because all of physics definitely doesn't work like that).
> It’s a criticism of using math where it doesn’t belong. That hasn’t really fit (until very recently) with economics
Well, if you consider Ricardo to be recent, maybe…
My point was speak for yourself, the history does not suggest you are correct. Evidence economists do care[1][2][3]. Economics was still a relatively newer niche discipline[4].
[1] https://developingeconomics.org/2024/10/22/the-nobel-illusio...
[2] https://ideas.repec.org/b/pup/pbooks/10841.html
[3] https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2024/10/nobel-priz...
[4] https://cooperative-individualism.org/parrish-john_rise-of-e...
Since you stand by your statement so strongly, you should have it already, correct?
I’d actually argue that the only people who love this piece of trivia are economists, financiers and a particular vein of Reddit.
Source: also an economist
Who really cares, its the top prize in the field, that is all that matters.
(I've been very critical of Aghion's work for the past few years since I've been exposed to his work over that period, but it always appeared to me as a potential laureate given the resonance of his work)
There is no science that correlates the use of arbitrary symbols posed as capital. Risk is risk, a primate bias.
Economics is essentially "mathematical politics". We can no more create a science of economics than a science of mythology.
https://mitpress.mit.edu/9780262049658/blunt-instrument/
Downvoting only proves the point: economics is like any primate bias, it enforces status at the cost of the collective or institutional. The US is a sad case for economic "modeling."
Maybe the word should be "activity" vs growth.
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1SG8IGOzeF49Pbf8JZ-JWyzPq...
We lose 10 million sq miles of forests a year and have lost 1/3 of forest areas since 1000Ad, so "reforesting" isn't a viable reversal project.
And reforestation is poorly understood as "reforesting" is pursued on land already lost to forest capability.
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-025-59799-8
"Reforestation is a prominent climate change mitigation strategy, but available global maps of reforestation potential are widely criticized and highly variable, which limits their ability to provide robust estimates of both the locations and total area of opportunity"
Reforestation might not solve our issues, but I don't see "nonsense."
By contrast, when people talk about sustained growth in economics, they do actually mean growth, an increase in the amount of goods and services consumed by the totality of individuals.
Jungles today are fantastically more complicated than they were a billion years ago.
Earth’s biosphere’s energy flux is higher today than it was hundreds of billions of years ago [1]. This is due to various metabolic “innovations.” It also occurred because life directly altered Earth’s atmosphere and at least surface geology that made it more conducive to more life [2].
> By contrast, when people talk about sustained growth in economics, they do actually mean growth, an increase in the amount of goods and services consumed
This is not how this fucking paper defines growth. Nor is gross consumption how most models define growth—the word production is right there in GDP.
Growth is not necessary but provides benefits. A country that grows improves its quality of life. Extreme poverty levels have been plumetting for decades because of said growth ( mostly represented in China and India). The poorest countries trade the least.
Economics today is mostly about data. For instance tariffs lead to worse outcomes for consumers; only populists like them. Or, compare housing affordability between areas with lax zoning or strict zoning. Just because data isn't gleaned from a physics experiment doesn't mean it isn't useful; more than likely you probably invoked social science research data to support a POV that wasn't a controlled experiment; was that all in fact nil in value? The facts don't matter, or rather, there are no facts and only ideology exists? That must be why communists twist themselves over "is" and "ought"
Until we move to measurement (ie analog) rather than binary statistics (which is still merely a project based in counting, yes, 1,2,3) then we are totally informationally emasculated.
That tells me nothing about your perspective. Your ideology is as identifiable as anyone else's and you have to do politics like anyone else.
> economics is purely the translation to settlement coercion for the production of Myth of the State/center-worshipping
It's not up to you. Economics has a definition.
> richest citizens in the world" in what sense? cash? real estate? these are arbitrary variables).
Wealth.
My ideology is the replacement of symbols with measurement. I have no relationship with politics, which is clearly a dinosaur still walking the Earth. Politics will vanish in the post-symbolic like a disease we cured easily.
No economics is like any word, it's arbitrary, that is HOW it needs a definition that varies from state to state.
"Economic theory has never gotten any better at prediction. Its explanations are always after the fact. The mathematical models economists have devoted themselves to for more than a century can’t be improved to enhance their empirical relevance." Alex Rosenberg
The deadness of the West is so unusual, as if the whole enterprise was for self-extinction of a way of poetically enhancing words, narratives and myths/religion. The West was simply a temporary state.
The west assumed individual happiness (politics, entertainment, biographical myth making, celebrity) was the path to collective happiness. But of course, in our agentic languages, that was simply the hydra of our undoing. The west was like a temporary infection that colonized and dominated more collective people, but now we will be subsumed if we don’t destroy the world in a suicidal urge to dominate
Is this meant to be post-modern? Whatever you feel about wealth, wealthier citizens overall are happier and have a better quality of life. Do you think people are clamouring to immigrate to the West for the weather?
> I have no relationship with politics
LMFAO. Dress it up all you want. You're either ideological or you aren't, you can't have your cake and eat it too. You're free to criticize Capitalism and/or Liberalism, but in doing so you can't pretend you believe in nothing that can be defined in political terms.
> Rosenberg quote
Economics doesn't try to predict what policymakers and irrational actors do. But it's generally good at forecasting some effects from changes along specific dimensions; if it wasn't, microeconomics and central banking wouldn't matter. If the interest rate increases 10 points overnight, what happens - nothing?
These things are dinosaurs. States are looming as extinct, religion, history, myth, storytelling are ancient tools. I'd start looking around outside of the C suite.
Think what's already under development that disintegrates out stodgy ideas of "wealth", currencyless societies, tokens, analog measurement replacing binary, syntax instead of grammar.
Ye olde Friedman-Galbraith (and any edgy sounding theorist) promoting currency, quant, interest, game-theory about economies are witch doctors that have already been unmasked by scientists. I've linked one above a few entries up.
Think for yourself, don't toe the line into senescence. Don't replay your father's tired ideas about wealth.
You keep telling yourself that, if it makes you feel any better.
In real life, it may mean that people feel that, though you state your points as though they are obviously true, you have given no reason for us to actually agree with your dogmatic assertions. That doesn't prove that economics is a primate bias; it proves that you are not doing well at persuading people.
“The myth is the prototypal, fundamental, integrative mind tool … to integrate a variety of events in a temporal and causal framework.” Merlin Donald
That's folk science, what Donald is describing (he admit this in Origins of the Modern Mind).
Remember that the causal framework must be evaded to reach scientific correlations, where multiple contradictions can lead to knowledge. Myth and history were addictive hiccups that trapped humans in way simplistic explanations.
We evade this "plain English" silliness, like economics, or go bust.
I move to my neighbourhood in 2019. Before I got round to visiting them, a bunch of pubs and eateries closed down for the pandemic, and never re-opened. One pub became new apartments. A cafe became some sort of spa.
Take the pub for instance, I could imagine it was a lifestyle business for someone who made enough money from it, but not a whole lot. Is it net good or bad (for the area) for somewhere like that to close? Was this lifestyle business depriving the area of better services, more tax revenue? Or does the area now get less services and the money is mostly extracted into the coffers of a non-local property development enterprise. Quite hard to judge. Maybe there’s some good heuristics for estimating such things?
Not all value is quantifiable in USD.
Generally Americans don't think of this because they think public services "shouldn't try to make money" and interpret this as they need to be designed to lose money as hard as possible. So public transit stations have no vending machines and activists are constantly trying to ban them from charging fares.
You are correct that the park provides real value to its users.
No space in 2025 for any such considerations.
[1] Case in point: I just read a news piece announcing that an 85 year old café in downtown Lisbon will be closed down to make way to yet another generic gentrified """brunch place""" for tourists. The regulars, many of them elderly and for whom the friendly place was basically a living room to help stave off lonelyness; many of them working people used to stopping by for fresh bread and a chat on their way home from work, are dismayed of course. But it's more "economically efficient" to cater to tourist jerkoffs and sell them the same overpriced egg on croissant that they can have in any large city in the world...
Sole proprietorships can be okay, but employee-hiring small businesses are run by tyrants and have fewer protections against worker abuse. After all, they're only small businesses because they aren't good enough to become big businesses.
If you have an issue with payroll I hope you don't avoid getting it fixed either, because that's HR.
It kind of echoes a common theme with LLMs, of humans creating systems that somehow work and only afterwards trying to make sense of why they work. We know that transformers are good at capturing context, and gradient descent is good at arriving at a working model of that context but how exactly this knowledge is being distilled and stored in an embedding space, no exact clue.
Is there some course which teaches the basics of macroeconomics?
Barro also has an old undergrad macro text which is good
The gap between undergrad macro and professional macro is extremely large. That shouldn’t dissuade you it’s just a note.
Economics is the study of scarcity. Scarcity comes in many forms: land, attention, materials, time. (It is not the study of money, which is a common belief of those who have not thought about what money is. Money is merely a fungible token claim on resources, not the resource itself.)
You could also believe that the study of physics is just the study of business, because businessmen operate in a world governed by physics.
https://rwer.wordpress.com/2010/10/22/the-nobel-family-disso...
Apparently, when the Riksbank decided it wanted to publicly fund a prize for the category, the verbosity of the name of the prize was a concession to distance it from the other simply-named Nobel Prizes, funded by the family.
> What was the position of the Nobel family? Three days before the meeting of April 26, the then director of the Nobel Foundation, Nils Ståhle, met two members of the family and telephonically talked with a third one. Their position was that “it should not become like a sixth Nobel Prize”, but that if the economics prize could be kept clearly separate from the Nobel Prizes then it might be an acceptable idea.
> They obtained her written approval of the economics prize “under given conditions,” namely that the new prize in all official documents and statements should be kept separated from the Nobel prize, and called the “prize in economic science in memory of Alfred Nobel.” In a telephonic conversation with a nephew, Martha Nobel said that the whole thing was prearranged and impossible to oppose, so that one could only hope that they would keep their pledge that no confusion with the real Noble prize should occur.
> What has happened is an unparalleled example of successful trademark infringement. However, nobody in the world can prevent journalists, economists and the general public from talking about the “Nobel prize in economics,” with all its connotations.
EDIT: Recognizing @huitzitziltzin 's comment, this factoid was originally imparted to me IRL 8 years ago by an economist, one Jackie Mallett of the Threadneedle banking simulation project (and who probably wouldn't mind my invoking her by name on this topic).
GolfPopper•3mo ago
https://web.archive.org/web/20071014012248/http://www.theloc...
nabla9•3mo ago
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45566804
huhkerrf•3mo ago
stuaxo•3mo ago
The other solution would he some equivilent of a community note for it every year, it seems like things work as is though.
lysace•3mo ago
They seem rigid enough to be useful, but I hope they can be done better. Perhaps using better simulation tools.
tovej•3mo ago
zwaps•3mo ago
tovej•3mo ago
Fun fact: The neoclassical economic school managed to remove the word "political" from "political economy" at the turn of the 20th century.
username332211•3mo ago
If anything, we're seeing the opposite results, where economists publish influential papers demographics, crime and social structure.
"When dealing with humans, linear regression is going to be good enough" is a huge assumption to make.
tovej•3mo ago
And if you're going to claim that economists are publishing influential papers in other fields - and especially if you're claiming that they're doing so in an unprecedented way, with no inter-disciplinary collaboration - please provide some examples. And if you're thinking of Freakonomics, know that no researcher takes Freakonomics seriously, and neither should you.
As for sociologists "invading" economics, they sort of are. Economics and sociology have quite a bit of overlap, and researchers from the two fields often collaborate. And any group researching economic phenomena, even an inter-disciplinary one involving sociologists, would be identified as economists, not sociologists, by people reading their work. Although David Graeber, an anthropologist, did write an excellent book on economic phenomena in "Debt: the first 5000 years", and it has done quite well. You could say that it's "influential".
Unfortunately, neoclassical economics also has wide political support among the people it benefits: wealthy people and institutions, e.g. banks. Which also means they get bankrolled (hah) much more than other social scientists, which means they get preferential treatment. E.g., this very "Nobel prize" in economy that this theead is about is funded by a bank.
The force to change economics qould have to come from within economics, perhaps from behavioural economics, or new Keynesian economics (the first one seems more promising), or even from movements like degrowth or circular economics. You can't expect a sociologist to fix a different field, and that wasn't the point. The point was simply that sociology doesn't suffer this embarassment because they are not burdened by ideological pressure backed by monies interest.
lanfeust6•3mo ago
tovej•3mo ago
lysace•3mo ago
tovej•3mo ago
But since you asked, here's an accessible overview: https://francescosyloslabini.info/2016/06/01/neoclassical-ec...
lanfeust6•3mo ago
https://replicationnetwork.com/2021/01/06/reed-the-state-of-... -- "indeed, there has been an increase in the number of replications over time. "
https://www.banque-france.fr/en/publications-and-statistics/... -- "First, we find a moderate replication success, in spite of a data availability policy."
tovej•3mo ago
But still, that is interesting. Thank you for taking the time. Although you first source is a survey of expectations by authors on replicability over time, not an actual measurement of replicability.
Your second reference says there are historically more replication studies being published now than before (people trying to replicate other studies), not that more studies replicate.
As you might be aware of, the number of scientific publications in general is growing, so I would also expect the subset if replication studies to grow. This is not very surprising or meaningful, but interesting.
The third one is actually about reproducibility, the authors have taken open data sets published together with papers and see if they can produce the figures and final values in the papers from the original data sets. That is an entirely different thing.
thrance•3mo ago
EDIT: apparently not. I would rather you explain to me why than downvote mindlessly.
AtlasBarfed•3mo ago
lanfeust6•3mo ago
underlipton•3mo ago
lanfeust6•3mo ago
andrepd•3mo ago
lanfeust6•3mo ago
StopDisinfo910•3mo ago
It's a field which is mostly interested in models and anyone can agree that a model is consistant and implies surprising things even if they think the hypotheses it makes don't faithfully represent reality.
It's endlessly fascinating to me how some people will happily disparage economics while having very little idea of what it's actually about.
331c8c71•3mo ago
astrange•3mo ago
The non-mainstrean economists (aka heterodox, aka cranks) are usually more obviously pursuing an agenda, but they definitely usually don't have better empirical evidence.
lanfeust6•3mo ago
andrepd•3mo ago
L M A O
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Mate, this is not physics. This is not a field with a measurable reality where you can, in fact, say that those who reject the empirical evidence are cranks. Economics allows for multiple incompatible interpretations of the same empirical observations.
Economics has several characteristics that make it unlike other sciences: basically the "underlying observable" is not an objective thing with an independent existence; unlike an atom, the object of economics changes when it's being studied and changes with the underlying changes in political and economic structure. Even its aims are open for discussion! Economics has more in common with sociology or philosophy than any of the hard sciences.
It's easy to see, if nothing else, because economic theories fall in and out of fashion just like political ideologies do.
I think it's perfectly fine to disagree with non-mainstream economics, or to criticise it on some concrete grounds. But to pretend anyone who disagrees with $current_view is a crank... Well it's symptomatic of the quasi-orwellian reality which certain sectors want to impose: it's not enough to say "ours is the right way", they want to say "ours is the only possible way".
I-M-S•3mo ago
StopDisinfo910•3mo ago
It doesn't really change anything to their inherent value that you build them from the hypotheses up or from the conclusions down. It holds the same that this set of interactions lead to this behaviour.
Sometimes going down can be equally interesting: "What would a system where tariff improves the overall well being of a country inhabitants look like?". Contrast the model requirements with empirical data and you have an interesting paper.
andrepd•3mo ago
And please do me the favour of not assuming I "have very little idea of what it's actually about". It's contrary to the site guidelines (and it's very annoying).
thrance•3mo ago
> concensus in Economics
That's what I was talking about. This "consensus" is completely made-up and propped up by, among others, the Sveriges Riksbank. To the point that there are people like you who feel they should defend them against the evil "authoritarian Socialist", because of course, as we all know, that's all there is besides Neoliberalism. I sincerly hope you consider broadening your horizons, maybe start by Thomas Piketty's work: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Piketty
lanfeust6•3mo ago
I made no such claim. I don't take issue with that list: the US by far leads in number of high‐profile economic researchers, high publication output, large number of employed economists.
Just as Mathematics is still Mathematics in the rest of the world, the broad perspective on Economics is not meaningfully different in the rest of the world. Even if it originated in the anglo-sphere, it's global. That's the point I made.
> This "consensus" is completely made-up and propped up by, among others, the Sveriges Riksbank.
Leading Economists globally find consensus on all manner of policy issues. Many academic papers model the effects of tariffs on prices, welfare, and the consensus is that tariffs generally harm consumers. Surveys conducted on Economists show strong consensus there.
> because of course, as we all know, that's all there is besides Neoliberalism
It's not a long list. Even Social Democracy darlings of Europe are effectively just Liberal with a bit more spending. Incidentally, France is in deep trouble because of this. Their public spending as a % of GDP far exceeds peers.
> maybe start by Thomas Piketty's work: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Piketty
Piketty is decidedly heterodox, and I've read Capital in the 21st Century, though not his latest which as I understand revisits much of the same. Wealth taxes have been tried in several countries including Austria, and promptly dropped. That's because they do not work well. It's difficult to implement and the returns just aren't good.
b00ty4breakfast•3mo ago
oh spare me. Social sciences are inherently political. They've always been political and they will always be political. Denying merely makes it worse. that's how you end up with the racialist anthropology of the 19th and early 20th centuries.
Don't hang a picture of a dog turd on your front door and cry about all the people pointing it out.
em500•3mo ago
Sure, it's paid by the Swedish central bank instead of the Nobel foundation, and it wasn't established by Alfred Nobel himself. Nobody cares. Value of such awards depends entirely on peer recognition, not on who pays or what exact labels they carry. Selection for economics is done by the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences, like the other science awards.
notahacker•3mo ago
AtlasBarfed•3mo ago
"Nobody cares" gotcha. Greed never cares.
astrange•3mo ago
neilwilson•3mo ago
And those who pay the piper call the tune.
Hence the brand of 'economics' that gets the gong.
andrepd•3mo ago
I-M-S•3mo ago
belter•3mo ago
Economics violates Popper demarcation criterion. Economic theories can't be falsified because you can't run controlled experiments on economies, rewind history, or isolate variables.
When models fail, economists adjust assumptions ...
Unfalsifiable = Unscientific.
rtsil•3mo ago
belter•3mo ago
immibis•3mo ago
atwrk•3mo ago
AnimalMuppet•3mo ago
belter•3mo ago
Rejecting Popper for that is like rejecting reasoning itself because you can’t run a control experiment on it...but then one turns into an economist...
atwrk•3mo ago
And if the source of that framework is not (part of your definition of) science, how do we know whether that framework is true?
That was sort of my point: Poppers criterion is nice, but only works for a small subset of (natural) science - and even there has to face criticism because it is simply too naive for many edge cases.
belter•3mo ago
In category theory terms, it’s a type error, applying a rule defined within a system to the meta-level that defines the system itself.
https://www.lesswrong.com/w/object-level-and-meta-level
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metatheory
IAmBroom•3mo ago
When models fail, physicist adjust hypotheses ...
belter•3mo ago
RandomLensman•3mo ago
belter•3mo ago
If these were economists, they would check if their equations match the economic universe they live in. :-) Instead, they conclude the agents just “did not behave rationally enough”.
RandomLensman•3mo ago
Not really my experience with economics - a lot of awareness of reality vs model (regardless of how "beautiful" they are).
genericresponse•3mo ago
At the risk of being inflammatory-- These arguments are the equivalent of saying that Newton didn't really do physics because his models of mechanics break down at high enough speeds and small enough scales.
JumpCrisscross•3mo ago
I genuinely have no idea why so many commenters on HN will spout nonsense based on high school curriculum with the confidence of a PhD when it comes to economics, but won’t embarrass themselves in other fields.
Yes, economics—particularly microeconomics—is constantly subject to experimentation. Macroeconomics is closer to astronomy, in that models are developed, novel data sources sought, old models tested and then validated or rejected. Also like astronomy, or perhaps more accurately fundamental physics, it’s currently off in a loop of DSGE optimizations which are mathematically pretty for the field but not super interesting outside it. (This work is not in that category.)
belter•3mo ago
Macroeconomics isn’t like astronomy :-) Stars don’t change behavior when you model them. Economies do. There are no stable primitives, no conservation laws, just shifting behavior and feedback loops.
DSGE models are equilibrium sandcastles calibrated to past data. In physics that’s failure while in macro it’s tenure.
Economics is interesting and sometimes useful but calling it an experimental science is self-flattery.
JumpCrisscross•3mo ago
...you can't rerun the universe under controlled experiments. That's the whole point of the "controlled" part. It's an artificially isolated environment designed to model a specific phenomenon.
If you want examples of thoroughly experimental economic disciplines, look to auction, bargaining and game theory.
> Macroeconomics isn’t like astronomy :-) Stars don’t change behavior when you model them. Economies do
Stars don't change, but the ways we look at them do. This sort of endogeneity in data collection and research methods is a constant source of noise and errors in the physical sciences.
You're correct in that it's much more pronounced in economics, since humans are agents. That puts boundaries on how much one can predict. But that doesn't make it unknowable through the scientific method.
> DSGE models are equilibrium sandcastles calibrated to past data. In physics that’s failure while in macro it’s tenure
I'm not going to defend DSGE any more than I will string theory. (I know a lot more about the former to be able to properly critique it than I do the latter.)
> Economics is interesting and sometimes useful but calling it an experimental science is self-flattery
I'm not an economist. But I apparently know more economics than a lot of people who make confident statements on this board about the field.
Several fields of economics are rigorously empirical. Others are strictly observational. And others are total nonsense. The fill of nonsense is higher than other fields, but that's mostly due to the relevance of the work. If the rise and fall of nations rode on the spectral pattern of Sagittarius A*, you'd probably have a lot of nonsense work around that, too.
yard2010•3mo ago
astrange•3mo ago
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HARKing
lanfeust6•3mo ago
Supposing it did was fairly predictable that not setting money on fire would help recovery, what does it matter that there is no controlled scientific experiment involved? Or to put it another way, are there no facts to be gleaned from data?
thrance•3mo ago
lanfeust6•3mo ago
You're deflecting. Curtailing inflation was an outcome of policy. The U.S. had fuck-all to do with it. Unless you're willing to acknowledge something so basic there's nothing else to say to someone disinterested in good faith discussion
genericresponse•3mo ago
Whether that's maintainable long term is probably the decisive judgement. Argentina has had many cycles of hyperinflation, reset, hyperinflation again. The current bailout is not exactly a positive indicator.
lanfeust6•3mo ago
yard2010•3mo ago
astrange•3mo ago
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Econometrics
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Credibility_revolution
Economists are practically the only social scientists capable of doing this (even if it involves a lot of rainfall IVs). Everyone else p-hacks and calls it a day.
moritz•3mo ago
Mirowski, Philip. 2020. “The Neoliberal Ersatz Nobel Prize”. Pp. 219-254 in Nine Lives of Neoliberalism, edited by Dieter Plehwe, Quinn Slobodian and Philip Mirowski. Verso. Fulltext: https://www.econstor.eu/bitstream/10419/215796/1/Full-text-b...