Economics, hit below the belt

I'm used to people sneering at economics. I'm used to people criticizing economics. But a Guardian columnist claims that economics has standards for evidence that are far below the standards of global warming research.

Orthodox economics is based on simplifications that so distort the real world as to make it unrecognisable, yet its basic tenets are credulously repeated on an almost daily basis in national newspapers and on television news. A genuinely evidence-based approach to economic policymaking would not produce a system remotely like the one we have, the business-as-usual version that many climate sceptics seem so eager to defend. Given its task, the vast range of subjects covered, the thousands of scientists involved, and the sheer size of its reports, what's stunning about the IPCC's work is that comparing it to any economic analysis used to actually run the world is like comparing the complete Oxford English Dictionary to a guide to slang published by the Sunday Sport. 

That's really a low blow. Mandatory two-point deduction. Your next foul, sir, you will have to forfeit the fight.

Comments

[pj]

I'm sure if economists wanted to mine the economics literature to generate some political propaganda, they could generate a telephone-thick report with thousands of citations all tending to promote leftist (or rightist) policies, just like the climate scientists.

But the analogy has some merit, in terms of realism of assumptions the two fields are similar. What is different is that the scholarly integrity of economists is greater, and the weaknesses of the dominant paradigms have been openly debated for centuries.

[fulkon]

I’ve thought long and hard about how to respond to this article. I’ve thought about the comparison between mathematical models, data collection, and academic inference and reasoning.

After two beta-blockers and a hand full of hair, this is all I could come up with: “Blithering Idiot!”

[JorgXMcKie]

Two things: 1) 'Climate Science' is subject to "evidence-based" scrutiny????? [in whose dreams?], and 2) this 'journalist' demonstrates everything I believe about those who write about stuff they really don't understand [say, statistics] could write more plausibly if they were occasionally given a whack upside the head with a large rock or a big stick.

[Jack]

I generally ignore anything written by someone who uses terms like ''GW deniers'' (or, to be fair, the conservative equivalent, say ''GW pushers''). But this is a simple case of a journalist who has never taken an economics course writing about what he believes economics to be. Such ignorant writers are a dime a dozen. They read Small Is Beautiful, or the latest Naomi Klein tirade, and chuckle at the narrow-mindedness of economists. As the physicist Wolfgang Pauli said, the journalist's claims are ''not even wrong'' (e.g., Wiki: ''based on assumptions that are known to be incorrect, or on theories that cannot be falsified or used to predict anything'').