• SacredExcrement [any, comrade/them]
    ·
    edit-2
    2 years ago

    The fact that you can talk to any two economists during any point in time and have them disagree with one another about why things are going well or even if things are going well is a solid attestation as to how much of capitalist economics is a bullshit guessing game with roughly 5,000 variables (some of which are MUCH more significant than others)

    Is inflation up due to overemployment? Or due to economic sanctions? Or due to rising income and wealth growth?

    Or is it maybe just due to corporations leveraging a crises into an excuse to price jack?

    • ssjmarx [he/him]
      ·
      2 years ago

      Economics in our society serves the same purpose as animal sacrifice served in Ancient Greece. Just git gud at reading the entrails, by which i mean economic indicators.

    • Wertheimer [any]
      ·
      2 years ago

      roughly 5,000 variables (some of which are MUCH more significant than others)

      Hey, not fair. They said "ceteris paribus."

      . . .

      Something @discountsocialism said in a Ukraine thread:

      It’s so impossible to predict a recession that there is an entire field of economics called nowcasting which tries to predict if we’re currently in a recession with poor results. If they can’t do that then they certainly can’t forecast into the future.

      https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nowcasting_(economics)

    • Runcible [none/use name]
      ·
      edit-2
      2 years ago

      didn't you look at the chart? It's pretty clear that inflation is due to low unemployment.

      Also, how complicated could economics be? It breaks down to a number of inviolate causative relationships/laws like "supply & demand" and apparently "inflation/unemployment"

      • SacredExcrement [any, comrade/them]
        ·
        edit-2
        2 years ago

        People who unironically parrot those comments always seem to forget that, while economic theory is to happen in an isolated, frictionless vacuum in much the same manner as beginning physics, capitalist economics does not care about how things play out in isolated, impossibly simple conditions (also much like physics)

        • CheGueBeara [he/him]
          ·
          2 years ago

          Also economics doesn't even have strong theoretical nor evidentiary grounding in those idealized conditions. In physics you can declare a frictionless vacuum, then create further experiments for wind resistance and friction to show how they operate and change the results - and how trends predicted through the simple models still hold.

          In economics, most of the time it's 35 friction models all at once and the economist goes in and says, "when I look at it from this angle, I see a direct relationship between these two variables", the :capitalist-laugh: celebrate it and give the economist a wing at a university and a think tank, and it is now canonized science.

          • YOuLibsWoulD [he/him]
            ·
            2 years ago

            My favorite story of this is "the tragedy of the commons". Literally started as an excuse for why a wonderful rich man would handle land better than ignorant poors because they would have incentive to over use the land. Then some turquoise grandma got a nobel for looking at anthropological data, finding that individual owners of commons are actually uniquely bad.