There was a brief moment when I was a young and impressionable voter who thought yeah, that makes sense. Being fiscally conservative. Having a government that lives within its means.
Then I had a look at the track record of conservative governments and had a good, long, belly laugh, and have never voted for one in my life.
It would help if there were many examples of real, significant fiscal conservatism. Instead it is almost always “reduce spending that doesn’t directly benefit me” which is very different.
Like most “conservative” policies.
That coupled with “decrease government income (taxes)” as the first resort means conservative governments always start off in a deficit position and most never get out of it. Decreasing taxes has not done anything to improve the lower 99% lives. It has only worked to shovel money into the 1%.
Yeah, there is a difference now, isn’t there? Like I reached voting age in the Reagan era (Mulroney here in Canada, but he was a carbon copy of Reagan). In those days, the conservative philosophy seemed to be just keep spending like crazy while slashing taxes (mostly corporate). Then leave the next government to clean up the mess with an austerity program.
But Trump/Musk actually did gut all sorts of programs while still somehow running up a jaw-dropping deficit, even by Republican standards. Americans are paying higher taxes (through tariffs) and losing services at the same time. Seems pretty indefensible, and I hope there is a reckoning at the mid-terms. Here in Canada, our government is also running a large deficit, mind you. I think it’s sort of unavoidable, though, given we are under economic siege.
Their whole world view is polluted by their “I’m rich therefore I must deserve it and I must be better than others”. You can’t grasp much when you think like that.
Oh they know about economics, enough to get what they want then leave everyone else holding the bag.
Luckily so are their voters
GOP = Grifting Old Pedos
They aren’t dumb, they just don’t give any fucks. All they care about is giving more and more tax breaks to their masters, our billionaie oligarchs. And they say anything regardless of truth, logic, sanity - anything that sounds good in the moment to get power, keep power.
They’re well into the negative fucks tbh.
Fucks… taken? heh
Gives me a sad because a “fuck taken” sounds like rape, which they certainly are rather worse about, sooooo… :/
The GOP is not dumb about economics, they know exactly who benefits from their policies. Republican voters may not understand it, but politicians do.
Nah, this used to be the case, but now enough of them have drank the koolade, they actually believe the nonsense far beyond what serves the grift. You can see it in the way their policies of the past 20 years keep fucking up the broader economy in ways which don’t really help anyone. You can see it in how the GOP has basically given itself over to Christian Nationalism, which is an ideological minefield, and frequently at odds with the will of the oligarchy.
Part of why this is so scary is because a standard con artist is still a rational actor. They might rationally fuck you over, but at the end of the day they will operate within a fairly predictable set of boundaries. Political and religious zealots famously don’t have those guardrails. And now what we have is the worst possible scenario - Christian nationalists who will subvert democracy for sky daddy, and Trumpists who will subvert democracy over their orange daddy aggrievememt complex.
I would argue they’re pretty dumb when it comes to economics, but they’re good at enriching themselves. None of them see that the long term leads to a destitute America, which means most of them end up being dragged down too. A prosperous America benefits everyone, a destitute one “helps” a very select few, which will not include all of them.
I think there are those who are playing dumb, like Cruz and McConnell, but you’ve got your Tubervilles and your Mark Wayne’s who really have drunk the middle school, edgelord koolaid.
End of the day though, dumb or playing dumb, you’ve got a whole party who continually tank the economy ever time they get into office and an electorate that eats up their lies.
McConnell
A secret corpse can’t play dumb
Don’t quote me on this, but I’m pretty sure he’s a vampire.
“Secret Corpse” is the new sequel to Secret Hitler. In this version, the Corpse is that person who said they’d show up at game night and then blew everyone off. After that, their teammates have to make bad-faith arguments claiming that the corpse is definitely alive. At the same time, everyone else has to write angry letters to vocalize that it’s unfair.
If the Secret Corpse does eventually show, their teammates must gloat, and the Secret Corpse gets to choose what games are played and gets to modify the game rules however they desire. Everyone else has to begin every statement with some variation of, “First off, I’d like to say how thankful I am that the Secret Corpse could join us. It’s been a harrowing journey for them to do the bare minimum.”
Markwayne bought a local plumbing business and a did exactly what a private equity firm would have done an now it’s one of the largest and most advertised plumbing businesses in the area and yet for decades it constantly has shit reviews.
Maybe he just got lucky, but it sure seems like there’s a lot of these dumbasses who have successful businesses and have successfully navigated the capitalist hellscape in the background.
I wouldn’t underestimate their ability to funnel money to the top while looking like they have no idea what they’re doing.
I am so sick of sociopathy being a winning strategy.
There’s a certain type of low cunning (that’s separate from intelligence) that’s a perfect fit for capitalism.
Those are the only people you will find in upper levels of government. Liars and obedient idiots.
Yep. They didn’t get rich by being dumb. They did it by keeping everyone else dumb.
The heritage foundation.
Since the 70s they have been directing GOP policy.
And the Heritage Foundation, or at least it’s ideology, date back to the earliest days of the union. We fought a civil war over it. But they’re a parasite. They maneuver into every little weakness and multiply.
In our time, the economics profession has undergone tremendous change for the better, and those neoclassical nostrums have been subjected to intense scrutiny by a new generation of economists who have seen with their own two eyes that markets do not always self-correct (another neoclassical assertion) and that sometimes, government intervention is required to achieve good ends.
Republican politicians didn’t get the memo. ** Nor did the American electorate. ** So it’s very easy to tell people, for example, that you’re going to open up federal lands to more drilling, and there’ll be more oil, and prices will go down. That’s about as much economics as your average person remembers from high school, and it makes intuitive sense.
That’s your actual root cause right there.
They’re greedy and don’t give a shit about anything else. That’s it. Their votes are being sold to the highest bidder.
Economics, as an intellectual discipline, is closer to theology than physics. Its power is proportional to the belief it commands.
Finance is an arbitrary subset of mathematics, cherry picked by the owning class, and applied as their supporting mythology.
It’s entirely imaginary, which means alternatives are only ever a conjuring away.
Brother, you are high as a kite
What they said is actually totally reasonable. People (particularly economists) treat economics as though it’s a hard science akin to physics or chemistry, but it’s a soft science. They gave David Card a nobel in economics for figuring out a way to actually test hypotheses some of the time. In 2021.
Econ is math explaining how anything affects markets, it uses actual logic to explain changes. Give me some examples of how theology uses math to explain anything
- Pascal used probability/expected-value reasoning to argue that wagering on God is rational.
- Gödel formally encoded an argument for God’s existence in higher-order modal logic.
- Plantinga uses modal logic to formulate the ontological argument.
- Bayes’ theorem used to argue for the existence of God by Richard Swinburne.
People use math to justify things. That is not the same as proving something. Show me cases where econs use math to prove something intrinsic to economies.
Econ 101. Law of supply and demand. Algebra and coordinate geometry. Nearly every concept taught in econ is a mathematical breakdown of why something happens in the economy.
That’s exactly the distinction I’m asking about. Algebra and coordinate geometry can represent supply and demand, and they can prove what follows if the model’s assumptions hold. They do not prove that the model accurately describes an actual economy.
For example, from assumed supply and demand functions, you can mathematically prove where their curves intersect. But mathematics alone cannot prove that real consumers have that demand curve, that real producers have that supply curve, that the relevant variables were held constant, or that the resulting equilibrium is what caused the observed market price.
“Price rises when demand increases, ceteris paribus” is a model-derived prediction. Whether real markets actually behave that way, under what conditions, and how accurately… all of that is empirical questions. Data can support, falsify, estimate, or justify the model’s applicability but the algebra cannot prove its correspondence to reality.
This is in stark contrast to physics. It makes economics look more like theology. Although, that’s probably still a loaded statement.
Regardless, “nearly every concept in Econ 101 has a mathematical breakdown” doesn’t answer my question. I’m specifically asking for an example where the mathematics proves that the mathematical model itself is an accurate description of the real economy, rather than merely proving consequences within the model.
And if the answer is that economics establishes that correspondence empirically rather than mathematically, then that’s precisely the distinction I was making.
it was a law based on studying supply and demand, how they interact and how that affects price and can be used for prediction. You are putting the chicken before the egg
In the bible one plus one plus one equals one or three or something.
Sounds like a lie that Satan would want me to believe
The holy trinity is one god the exists as three separate people.
It’s in the bible.
1+1=6, got it
Give me examples of economists coming up with hypotheses and then building experiments to test them.
The 2008 financial crisis?
The global financial crisis was a huge surprise to most economists and is basically the #1 example of the field not having any predictive power, something you generally want from a hard science.
I mean, that’s an experimental result. It’s not a positive result, but it is a result.
Where’s the flaw in my comment?
I went to uni for business admin with a concentration in finance and I disagree with all of it.
Econ is a social science that studies the effects decisions have on a market, it uses math to explain it. Econ is not the cause, econ is the study of.
Finance is not an arbitrary subset of mathematics. It’s calculus, derivatives, and polynomial models that predict and explain.
You may as well call math and logic imaginary
it uses math to explain it
It uses math sometimes.
Economics is not a hard science. Which is fine. But let’s not pretend it’s all math and logic. It includes attempting to predict human behavior, you can’t do that with just math.
“Do people think we’re currently in a recession” is actually used by economists as a recession indicator.
I’m not saying it’s a hard science, im disagreeing with it being closer to theology than physics, that’s absurd
Except in terms of predictive power it’s just barely more successful than random chance. As a discipline it’s still largely in its most primitive stage, and still full of unproven and largely hypothetical assumptions that amount to little more than idle musings and superstitions. It’s so full of holes it’s just slightly more rigorous than pseudoscience. Perhaps in 100 years it will develop into a more respectable discipline, but at this stage it’s at best a tool for short term modelling and post hoc analysis.
What do you think i mean when I say predictive models. Like what do you assume is predicted.
I think you may need to simply define the terms used after “calculus.” I just did two things that oddly coincide with having read this comment. One, skipped a YT video that promised to simply explain calculus, and two, commented elsewhere:
"One thing that really scares me about the fall of the empire of my birth is, even if a revolution succeeded, not only who would be in charge, but would they actually understand large scale administration, distribution, logistics, of goods and finance? We’ve allowed ourselves to be so proudly uneducated for si long, because “There are professionals for that.” Well, yes, but honest ones?“
Edit, because I should add, an honest one that actually will be appointed to the task.
Derivatives is a part of calculus and polynomial models are algebraic equations with multiple variables, is that what you’re asking?
in my experience, Econ education is the study of a single economic system - capitalism. Did they ever discuss alternative socioeconomic systems or simply say ‘state ownership = bad’?
You studied capitalism because you live in a capitalist society. Did you major in econ? If not, you likely wouldn’t have been taught much more than what is relevant to your life.
No not my major - my experience was just econ 101 but I like reading about economics in my free time, and it seemed like econ 101 at my US university should have been called Capitalism 101. My comment was moreso to see if that changes at later stages in the economics-major program.
It’s the same with History class in high school, they’re going to teach you more about your country than others until you dive deeper academically because the base knowledge they want to teach is stuff that would be relevant to you. I didn’t major in econ but it was mandatory all 4 years. Once you get into macroeconomics they start discussing international econ more.
There seems to be some huge misconception that economics is what causes problems when economics is actually the diagnostic tool to explain what’s going on. The same backwards logic as people who think the inflation rate is set by a government or bank and controls how much prices should go up as opposed to a number calculated based on how much prices have gone up.
This isn’t true, though. Economics is a material study of social relations that objectively exist and are reinforced by how we produce and distribute. Bourgeois economics tends towards idealism, turning it from materialism. We cannot simply “conjure” a new system. Systems are material processes, and so we must take a scientific, rather than utopian, approach.
