I didn't dig beyond what was reported in this article, but my suspicion is that economic research will be excluded from these cuts. Assuming that to be true, that is where I'd expect to see a lot of social sciences research to be carried out.
Some disciplines in the social sciences in recent years have taken a pretty hard turn towards qualitative methods and epistemologies that are either misaligned with or explicitly reject the scientific method.
I think dropping funding for social sciences is a mistake, but at the same time (and I'm tipping my hand a bit here), the social sciences might benefit from a renewed emphasis on methods that can result in generalizable findings. I've read some case study / qualitative papers in recent years that, uh, do not give me the strong impression that some parts of the academy are serious stewards of the funding society entrusts to them.
In short, I think a correction is warranted, but I hate to see it happen as part of a charged ideological / political process.
Agreed. But I don’t think economics is off the hook here either. To me it’s the social science that best masquerades as a “hard” science while still make huge jumps in logic that are rarely justified in the papers I’ve read.
I studiously avoided making a normative statement that economics should take over this role. Any personal preferences I have here are separate from my beliefs about what I predict to happen. :-)
I ~agree with you about the quality of econ papers. In some cases, I see the quantitative facility of econ papers as being better than similar studies executed by e.g. sociologists. But in some cases, flashy quant skills are used to distract from more fundamental issues.
Assuming my prediction that social science research shifts to econ comes to pass, I think the natural pressure will be to drag econ's present quality bar downward.
> But in some cases, flashy quant skills are used to distract from more fundamental issues.
I agree, I sometimes thing economists like quantitive approaches because it makes them feel like "real scientists" and numbers have an air of credibility.
It look a lot of arguing to let my MSc dissertation supervisor let me do one on financial theory (which I am good at) rather than econometrics (which i struggled with).
Worst offenders of liking quant approches to feel like real scientists may be when psychologists use formulas to describe their theory like they're a mathematician. All it does is making their theories obtuse, while no math actually happens...
I think the problem is more with the institutions and incentives e.g. to publish a lot for funding, than it is with social sciences as a thing. Qual stuff is much lower effort... And to be clear I think Qual has a place there, it just shouldn't be the only thing and it certainly shouldn't be masquerading as quant... But going all quant in social sciences could quickly become harmful if it isn't tempered with some qual/experiential studies. There needs to be a better balance imho.
Economics research is a series of cults who all predict different outcomes for the same series of inputs based on how the original founder of the cult, I mean school, felt about the king and his ability to tax the wealthy several centuries ago.
There are several trillion social sciences more rigorous than economics.
As far as I can tell economic researchers actively discourage experimentation because the results of an actual well-run valid experiment would ruin everyone's career.
While we're bashing economics, something I truly miss is that no new high level economic systems are being discussed prominently. As important as fusion in physics or cancer treatment in medicine, we badly need to explore and discuss something beyond the heavily ideologized systems of capitalism, communism and feed this to politics to communicate these potential options to the voters. Say, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Georgism, which is old and half forgotten. It appears as economics is kind of muted, students and professors beholden to an ideology themselves or feeling the need to appease potential employers who are usually politicized institutions with no room for intellectual curiosity. What else remains in terms of practical economics besides determining the inflation rate (oops, that one is also politicized)?
People love to talk about ideology, but is what what economics should be about? Every major economy on the planet is a mixed economy. In China, government expenditure and revenue are 33.1% and 25.5% of GDP respectively. In the US, the corresponding percentages are 38.5% and 32.9%. Neither totally free markets nor planned economies seem to work, and empirical research obliges economists to look at the economies we actually have.
I think Piketty does kind of do what you're talking about -- and though he makes a good case, I think when he argues for concepts like universal inheritance, that's more an act of political advocacy than economic scholarship. It's for the economist qua economist to study/analyze the conditions under which the rich get richer, or where class mobility decreases, etc -- but it's up to people and governments to choose what they want society to look like.
My impression is that economics is like voting. We have a dozen different alternative structures that aim to fix many of the most obvious issues from centuries of use. but no government system has an incentive to shake things up to such a degree.
We have a gigantic broken window, but the house still works. And ofc my government system has generally had a reactionary response rather than a preventative one; nothing gets done until it's too late and many people die.
I think access to that much capital as assess to strategic resource, not as wealth for individuals.
At that level of wealth, it doesn't make sense to think about fancy cars and mansions and living an extravagant and luxurious lifestyle. At that point, you got it made.
However, if you're talking about building something meaningful, that's a different matter entirely. That requires far more capitals than what is required to sustain a person indefinitely. There are shows that I would love to revive and reboot, such as Stargate. There are researches I want to do or fund, such as research into 3D printing, or do long term research grants so that people can do meaningful work.
The money's not for living. It's for projects. If your personal projects don't require that much money, you can always give it away to fund other people's projects.
I agree with you that great wealth can be used to fund meaningful research and development. Unfortunately, as we have seen, great wealth is used to distort society to reinforce their ability to hold onto wealth.
I was commenting on people bemoaning about billionaires being too rich, with the implication that billionaires shouldn't ever need that much money.
I don't necessarily agree with the idea of cutting basic research programs and how it's actually structured(short termism, prioritizing novel results over building solid foundation, etc).
Somehow people making these sort of hypotheticals about billionaires spending or dispersing their money always make a mistake like this.
"Jeff Bezos has 300 billion dollars. There are 300 million people in America, so he could give everybody a million dollars."
For fun, calculate how long the billionaires of America could fund America's social programs if they were taxed at 100%. If you ask people this, the off-the-cusp estimates are usually something like a thousand years, a century, some huge number like that...
Sure but those hypotheticals are just poorly thought out ways to visualize the imbalance. Another way to do it would be saying "Jeff Bezos has 300 billion dollars, that is 300 thousand millions. There are 300 million people in America, so $1000 has been taken out of every American's share of the national wealth and reserved exclusively for Jeff Bezos". Repeat that for every billionaire in the US and you should be able to demonstrate quite the imbalance.
Of course that assumes you think Earth's and society's (or at least the US's and Americans') resources should exist for all humans (or Americans) and the ideal balance would be based on as little as one needs and as much as one can contribute, i.e. literally how early human communities operated and how human communities still often operate outside economical contexts (e.g. after a natural disaster). You can say that model doesn't scale but I don't see a good argument for why that should be a reason to use a completely different model unless you're literally among the few people it disproportionately benefits (if you ignore how ruinous it usually is to them too at a human and interpersonal level because of how much it alienates them from almost anyone else around them).
That’s also misusing maths though because Amazon is a global company so really you should divide by 8 billion or at least a couple of billion.
As a Brit I think I’ve derived significantly more than $1000 in value through Amazon’s existence as compared with the status quo beforehand, and that’s exclusively counting the shopping part and not anything else they do. You can ask the question about whether it would have happened anyway in a communist paradise or whether Bezos gets the correct percentage of the reward but I mean, it actually is a very useful thing.
Similarly with Apple and Google and so on. These companies make things that people for the most part choose to use.
This whole argument also assumes there is something called "Americas National Wealth" and that its a zero sum game where there is x dollars to be distributed around to everybody.
Capitalism is not a zero sum game, and people can choose to turn effort into wealth or they can choose to sit around and do nothing.
Yeah. I feel as if there's a (small, but growing?) group of people out there who just sort of see, ok, well, everyone isn't as well off as I think they should be, so those who are doing well must just be hoarding everything. Which really just doesn't make sense at all.
It's usually based on nothing other than pure vibes.
It could theoretically be true if e.g. some billionaire just decided to buy up a load of houses and leave them empty just to piss people off, but whilst theoretically they probably could do this (e.g. if I back of the envelope it, Elon actually has enough net worth to offer everyone in my hometown double the market value of their house and then just leave them to rot without even renting them out), no-one actually does.
Except he does not. His assets are valued at 400B, provided that he pinky swears not to try to actually sell them, in which case they will be worth much, much less.
He can only share his shares and assets at 400B if the market thinks they're worth 400B, and if there are enough buyers for all 400B. And once he starts selling, the market might re-evaluate the worth of the shares.
Isn't Twitter a good counterpoint? I vaguely recall Musk had a hard time liquidating shares to buy it?
That is the meaning of what I call orderly liquidation. Sales are usually structured in order not to crash the market.
That being said, just because you need to structure a big sale does not mean it can not be done, or that you can not leverage your asset to have cash available at short notice. For instance, a loan with your actions as collateral will let you structure your divestment over years for a very moderate price.
Again, what I’m describing is not science fiction, it’s litterally what happened with twitter.
Imo it would be a harder challenge to find valuable stuff to buy than to divest orderly.
> Isn't Twitter a good counterpoint? I vaguely recall Musk had a hard time liquidating shares to buy it?
From what I remember, the issue was more along the lines of him making an offer without thinking it would be accepted, and then be under the gun because he was not prepared. Even then, he eventually found a reasonable financing scheme.
Selling a billion dollars of amazon via blocks etc with limited market impact? Probably doable if not super cheap.
3-400b? No way. There isn't capacity, you would cause a massive dip in prices. The timelines you would have to exit over would be very long, so disclosure also causes market reaction.
Loans work to an extent, but you get risk adjusted and eg 1bn of amazon stock is pretty low risk whilst 100bn is high risk. Concentration/size vs market cap and adv matter.
You can do it all, at a price, but it would be a lot lower than the current stock price for obvious reasons
If Bezos declared he was selling all his amazon stock - the market would react badly. Both due to the scale of inventory and the implications of his alignment and investment.
Dimon sold some stock and it was front page news, and it wasn't that much.
I'm pretty sure that he didn't liquidate $50bn in stock to get the money for buying twitter. (That $50bn includes the 20% capital gains tax, that leaves $40bn in cash)
The (US) economic system isn't economics, anymore than the (US) political system is political science. You're conflating the instance of one particular system with the study of those systems. You're also confusing economists with actual representatives who pass laws. Might as well blame climatologists for climate change.
This is not true and is a very common misunderstanding of modern wealth.
Elon Musk owns hundreds of billions worth of stock.
First, the value of those stocks varies from day to day. He can gain or lose billions of dollars in "net worth" on any given business day.
Second, he is not free to sell that stock however and whenever he wants; he has to get approval from the boards of his various companies and is limited in the timing and amounts he can sell. Additionally, selling large amounts of stock causes the price to drop, AND dilutes his ownership in, and therefore control of, those companies.
I think a lot of people have this stupid idea of Scrooge McDuck swimming in pool of cash, when they think about billionaires. That's not how it works, for most billionaires (I'm not sure about middle eastern oil royalty).
In reality, businessman billionaires have most of their wealth in stock, and it is not liquid, and they borrow against the stock (i.e. use the stock as collateral for personal loans) and sell small percentages of it to finance their lifestyles.
If you created a company, and it became wildly successful, and it was publicly traded, who should "own" the company? Should you be forced to divest, and therefore cede control to people who had no involvement in the company's initial success? Is that good for founders or for companies? How does it benefit society?
Also note that profitability influences stock price, so taking away control from the people who made a company profitable, has a high likelihood of making the company less profitable, which in turn will almost certainly result in each stockholder becoming poorer. Remember that most stockholders aren't Elon Musks, they're John Q. Publics with a 401(k).
> Also note that profitability influences stock price, so taking away control from the people who made a company profitable, has a high likelihood of making the company less profitable, which in turn will almost certainly result in each stockholder becoming poorer.
You're looking at the world as a poor person. If you had Elon's brilliance you'd probably quit after you made $5 million dollars or so and definitely after you sold Zip2 back in the 1990s and spent the rest of your life on the beach. The only reason he's still working as hard as he does is not because he wants to spend that on himself. He wants the glory of going to Mars and having a positive impact on humanity and that requires control of the activities of large companies like SpaceX, etc. which requires ownership stakes in those companies that are valued in the billions.
One of the reasons that he campaigned so hard for Trump is that Kamala's proposed wealth taxes on unrealized capital gains were going to take his companies from him and he'd have to sell to Vanguard or Blackrock, who would give control of the companies to Boeing-tier mediocrity which would mean that we'd never get to Mars. There have been so many companies where the founders sold out and retired because they had enough money and they got bought by big conglomerates who destroyed those companies with mediocre management and neglect. This is the great thing about Elon, he just keeps building and leveraging all that money to create bigger and bigger companies using his creativity and management ability to achieve his goal of launching an era of space exploration.
It's the most likely interpretation toe because it fits the known facts.
Ungenerous interpretations don't make sense and don't fit the known facts.
Musk isn't hiding his intentions. He's blasting them. He wants to make humans an interplanetary species. He wants his name to be associated with that for millennia. I don't see anything wrong with that and have trouble understanding why people hate him souch for it.
- his work pracices at all his companies are that of an imbecile manbaby. There are very public reports of this for Tesla and SpaceX, at the very least.
- his "hyperloop" plan delayed a proper trans-state transportation system for a decade+
- he proceeded to further ruin twitter and be completely contradictory on his whole "free speech" advocation
- he literally tried to buy votes for a national US election. Then admitted his lottery was never a fair lottery (i.e. fraud). Pretty much knowing any lawsuits after the election was a cost to do business.
- and his punishment? being a part of a stupidly named cabinet organization that will probably do the opposite of its stated goals, given his history.
Those are just off the top of my head.
What reasons do I have to like Musk? Because he didn't screw up SpaceX as hard as NASA was screwed by the federal government? That he was first to market for American EVs (because US was too busy defending oil and ignoring that other countries were pushing ahead)?
Some people don't want to be an interplanetary species at the expense of more urgent priorities; to them it isn't compelling that an ambitious man wants to immortalize himself using concepts from the science fiction of his childhood
It ain't deep. He wants to influence American policty to get more money for whatever personal ideals he has. This isn't mind reading so much as reflecting on his actions from this year alone.
> He wants to make humans an interplanetary species.
Sure, that's one of the things he wants to do. But his actions don't demonstrate that this is the primary thing he wants to do.
You can't build a sustainable colony on Mars without establishing a sustainable supply line until it reaches self-sustainability. Given what we know about Mars at this point, we're easily centuries away from achieving self-sustainability on Mars even if we fully committed to this goal right away. This means it's not just a cool tech problem, it's a logistics problem and logistics are boring. There's a reason Musk has repeatedly said he merely wants to make it possible to colonize Mars, not that he wants to do it. He's also smart enough that he doesn't want to go there himself because he knows it would mean dying in a barren wasteland even in the best of cases. Musk doesn't want to do the digging, he wants to sell the shovels.
If we want to build up the supply lines to colonize Mars, we at the very least need not just cool space tech but also boring stuff like a permanent supply base on the moon. But the moon has become boring ever since the end of the Space Race and building a supply post on the moon is - again - a boring logistics problem first, not a cool space tech problem. And because it's boring, it's far easier to see the big problems with it (all of which not only hold true for Mars but also do so to a much greater scale): any supply lines you build to the moon require supply lines on Earth first.
If you want sustainable supply lines in space, you have to build sustainable supply lines on Earth. And to have sustainable supply lines on Earth for space, you need a sustainable source of surplus resources. And even if we ignore the social implications of generating such "surplus" when millions live in abject poverty, this can only work if we prevent climate change from spiraling further out of control because it's difficult to run a business when the economy has collapsed and even more difficult to get work done when all the workers keep dying (presumably dying consumers are a smaller issue if we only consider valuations not revenue).
Tesla initially produced four reasonably mass market EVs but the most Musk contributed to them personally concept-wise was the childish naming scheme to spell out "S3XY". This was followed by an electric semi that is largely forgotten after the initial hype and the Cybertruck which literally isn't considered road-safe in most countries and hardly qualifies as "mass market". Despite promising FSD for years, the best Tesla has demonstrated since were robotaxi concept cars that again don't seem to have been designed with mass market use in mind. As for FSD and robotics: again Tesla hasn't yet demonstrated any ability to come anywhere near Musk's promises. So contrary to the popular narrative Tesla is not "building an EV future" - not that it would be helping address climate change even if it were because that would require a focus on mass transport.
Which brings us to the next thing: the Boring company. Again Musk's narrative sold this as an important step in preparing for Mars because if water is underground on Mars we'll need a lot of tunnels but the company is best known for its many projects announced and subsequently cancelled or abandoned across the US - and the Las Vegas "Loop" which is a claustrophobic underground shuttle service with gamer lights and mostly exists because Elon Musk hyped the idea of a (high speed vacuum tunnel) "Hyperloop" to - and it's worth pointing out that he has literally admitted as much since - preempt plans to build a public highspeed rail system.
What else was part of the narrative? Oh, right: SolarCity. Again Musk bought a company and claimed it was part of a plan to colonize Mars because we don't have fossil fuels on Mars so certainly the future must be solar - and of course those Tesla Superchargers need to be charged somehow, too. The company was eventually folded into Tesla (as Tesla Energy) and has shifted from mass market solar panels to making most of its revenue from batteries and selling primarily to big customers.
SpaceX at least largely does what it says on the tin if you ignore that it mostly still exists because the US government all but abandoned direct investments in space travel and SpaceX managed to collect a number of lucrative government contracts by controlling a de-facto monopoly position. Starlink also mostly seems to exist to exert an uncomfortable amount of political power over the governments that have bought into it (as the Ukrainians had to find out the hard way).
Elon Musk has an almost obsessive hyperfixation on the letter X and the idea of colonizing Mars, yes - he's autistic. But that doesn't mean everything he does he does in service of that goal. It doesn't even mean he actively contributes towards that goal in a meaningful or well thought out manner. It doesn't explain why he decided to father an uncomfortable number of children with an even more uncomfortable selection of partners (especially when it comes to business partners and employees) or why he's extremely selective in which token child he decides to shower with praise and attention (if not his own then at least in public appearances). It doesn't explain why he actively sabotages more climate friendly public mass transit projects to favor unsustainable individualized transport deliberately designed in such a way it can not be accessible to most. It doesn't explain why he decided to make a great show of "leaving the left" and presenting himself as "anti-woke" just in time when a big hit piece on him was about to be published because of his inappropriate behavior toward women. Etc etc. None of that logically follows from the goal of making humans an interplanetary species except in the most trivial of ways (i.e. stranding a person on Mars would technically make humans an interplanetary species for as long as that person survives).
The hate (if you just want to lump all criticism or distate into that label) Elon Musk gets is not "because he wants to make humans an interplanetary species", he gets it for the things he does. And in many cases what he does is actively damaging to his stated goal.
You're still assuming having a "primary goal" means one's actions have to be aligned with achieving that goal.
I didn't say "making mankind an interplanetary species" isn't his primary goal, I said that it's not the primary thing he wants to do. What he seems to want to do is be rich, father an absurd number of children with different women and be cheered on and celebrated by his fans and sycophants. He literally bought Twitter on a whim because he liked the attention he got there. He's obsessed with appearing "cool" ever since people called him "real life Tony Stark" and he let it get to his head even though his popularity massively took a nosedive shortly after.
Yeah, all his antics in buying/posting on Twitter and his pushing of the Cybertruck, BS androids, "hyperloop" etc are totally part of a grand mission in the service of mankind, and not the acts of an obsessive, socially mal-adjusted narcissist.
Gwynne Shotwell is more responsible for SpaceX's operational success than Elon will ever be, she's clearly done a great job of managing up and letting him take the "glory" he so desperately yearns for, but all he really provided was the initial vision and money. Not to understate that contribution, but his supposed "brilliance" is pure marketing. We've seen what happens we he actually gets meaningful operational control of a company (Twitter) and a product (Cybertruck), and it isn't good.
We've already sent probes to Mars. There's no reason to send people other than to show we can. It's extremely uninhabitable...like Antarctica is a paradise in comparison with water, air, and a lack of radiation. We have nowhere near the technology to terraform Mars either. I guess you could dig someone a cave and send them some nuclear batteries and a bunch of prepackaged food, but what's the point?
Elon is an oligarch plain and simple. SpaceX is impressive, and I'm a big fan of NASA's research, but let's look past the marketing of him trying to save the human species or whatever.
I do think humanity may have to settle another world (or move to a post-biological existence where we can just park our satellite brains around a star for energy), but this is going to take a lot of scientific advancement over many centuries. Elon's plan would make a lot more sense if Mars was an Earth 2.0 and we just needed to move a bunch of people there, but it's not and even if we do find something really close to Earth with JWST, it would take centuries to get there. In short, our best approach is to save the planet we already have and continue funding scientific research.
> There's no reason to send people other than to show we can.
That is true for lots of other things. What's the point of building the Taj Mahal? What's the point of running a marathon? What's the point of getting the world record for the longest time spent underwater? Just to show that we can.
> Elon's plan would make a lot more sense if Mars was an Earth 2.0 and we just needed to move a bunch of people there, but it's not and even if we do find something really close to Earth with JWST, it would take centuries to get there.
I agree that we probably won't be able to have a viable Mars colony in our lifetime. However, I do think that the pursuit of that goal will result in lots of useful inventions; just look at what SpaceX has accomplished already.
Making a reusable rocket is not the same thing as a sustainable settlement in a hostile environment. I mean sure ...why not other than it's a huge waste of resources.
Musk aside, I think there is huge value in knowing how to sustain human life indefinitely without the earth. In fact, I think its inevitable that humans will need to leave earth at some point in our future.
It may simply be as a result of population and overcrowding, it may be to flee war and persecution. I think there is a small chance we have already made changes to our atmosphere that make life here incompatible with humans.
Its possible that within just a few hundred years, humans need to live entirely within climate controlled environments. If I had Musk level money I would be working on this now.
it may be a hot take, but yes. A lot of humanity has indeed been ways to show off how big someone's dick is, or as a dick measuring contest.
The moonlanding was an amazing but ultimately useless landmark in the grand scheme of things. Very little of the tech used back then is useful for a practical space supply line. The ability to launch out of our atmosphere and later put sattelites into orbit was 90% of the worth of such resarch 60 years later.
We've already sent probes to Mars. There's no reason to send people other than to show we can. It's extremely uninhabitable...like Antarctica is a paradise in comparison with water, air, and a lack of radiation. We have nowhere near the technology to terraform Mars either. I guess you could dig someone a cave and send them some nuclear batteries and a bunch of prepackaged food, but what's the point?
People always look at this with hard nosed pragmatism. That's the wrong lens to view Space colonization. It's a vision and a dream.
In answer to your question, it is irrelevant. It doesn't matter how much money musk has, or you have, or bezos has, or the government has. What matters is where that money is invested.
If musk was using his money to bang hookers on solid gold yachts, fine, complain about it. But he isn't. He doesn't even own a house.
Stop worrying about another man's dollar and start worrying about being a better and less covetous person.
Elon is clearly using his fortune to enact wide scale societal change. He's currently chilling in the president-elect's house and chatting with foreign leaders. How Elon spends his money shouldn't be my problem, but he's dead set on making it that.
he apparently has a personal axe to grind against transgenders thanks to his daughter. he's also placed himself in charge of some kind of widespread government defunding program with decreased regulations for his businesses at the top of the agenda.
well you're making a horrible argument of it. All you seem to be doing is saying "he's doing good things" and you dismiss any disagreement with "well what do you think he's doing?" with no further discussion.
Musk is a great argument that while the government is inefficient, they are still beholden to laws and people. Musk isn't. Tax him to high hell.
New Zealand has a conservative government since the most recent election. Economists help conservatives stay in power, while sociologists and so on help conservatives stay out of power. Conservatives are very quid pro quo. That's the difference. It has nothing to do with the content of the research.
Economics is the worst social science, an economist is never considered wrong, only of a different “school of economics”. Economists speak as if they have authority and as if their field is objective, but at the same time have those “schools”.
Is there such a thing as an unideological economist?
I think your idea of economics is more informed by online debate than actual research. Contemporary economists mostly try to articulate things through econometrics, which is a fairly data driven field. It’s fair if you have issues with the rigor of these studies but a discussion of schools is fairly off base from my experience.
My objection is to the idea that everything true and important can be captured in metrics and quantitatively modeled. Then there is the fact that even to the extent that things like macroeconomics can be modeled (which is never at a level of accuracy that would be accepted in any scientific discipline), it still often fails to capture the social/political dynamics of the moment such that the theory matches felt experience. I believe that economics has largely captured power in social science by essentially stealing scientific authority and falsely claiming it as their own. Then they dismiss other fields of social inquiry as soft and unworthy of equal status even though their own insights are often of lesser value than the supposedly soft social sciences.
I'm an acolyte in the church of bounded rationality and the fallibility of institutions that practice science.
I studied journalism as an undergraduate, and my beliefs here are like in journalism. Objectivity is impossible, like a Platonic ideal. But, it's an excellent thing to strive for. "Fuck it, it's impossible" is the wrong answer in my opinion.
Qualitative methods and pure theory scholarship have their place, but most useful qualitative research at least hints at some testable hypotheses. I feel that an underemphasis on generalizability is what happens when disciplines give up. And at worse, theory-based scholarship as it's applied in some social sciences is really no better than really obtusely worded political punditry.
Exact numbers are easy to measure but not the only way to measure something. Data-driven is the new statistics but 10x worse because it has more sources of obfuscation, and bean counters (including super “smart” and analytically minded) obsess narrowly over models. Add ML/AI and you got an order of magnitude again.
There’s an impedance mismatch where we have enormous amounts of useless data and a small amount of useful data. Best we can do is use and create more of the useful data instead of obsessing over P>.99 on something useless that will be misinterpreted anyway.
The problem, in my view, isn’t qualitative per se, but rather unfalsifiability. Ideology is when the solution is always more of the same no matter what the outcome is. Communism/socialism and neoliberalism all fall in this category. I believe this holds true if you go more academic into Keynesianism and say Chicago school - models that have become truisms to their followers.
These two statements are at opposition with one another.
I was a journalist for 20 years, and any entry-level reporter can put together a completely objective story. It happens thousands of times a day. Unless you somehow derive bias in stories like "A woman died when her car hit a brick wall on Main Street."
Saying objectivity is not possible is just an internet-age excuse for mental laziness.
Facts that are included in a story or left out at the journalist's discretion have the power to create very different impressions on people.
For example, in your story, if Main Street is known to house many brothels or abortion clinics, merely mentioning it in the story may have the effect of hardening public opinion towards the victim. If the story were to mention the make and model of the car, and there had been many crashes with that model recently, it might stir up suspicion about that car manufacturer. Almost any detail can be charged in this way.
All good journalists strive to be as objective as possible, part of which means being aware of these kinds of charges, and balancing them against delivering detailed information.
How is objectivity possible? Your writing and the reader’s interpretation of it are entirely dependent on individual sensory input and mental models, which are influenced by cultural differences in upbringing and other environmental sociological factors.
The writing inevitably leans towards “objectivity” in your worldview.
Correct. A graduate degree in economics is much closer to an applied math degree than something that resembles what we would traditionally consider social sciences.
To me it seemed like there were two kinds of economics degrees.
One was a math degree pretending to be about the economy. At the graduate level, it could be a science: actually going out and measuring things with some pretty hardcore tools, and then publishing a theory that nobody who ought to use it (AKA politicians) would ever be able to understand. There's real findings here on stuff like the minimum wage, which you'd think someone would care about.
It could also be just some extremely complicated derivations that pretended they were related to the real world, but with ridiculously mathematical assumptions.
The other was a softie-softie "talk about how the world works" degree with barely any mathematics, just lots of readings and essays.
You could choose what you wanted to do.
This is why I've never quite figured out how to assess economics graduates. I don't know what they got up to. They also seem to do some very disparate kinds of work once they (I guess I should say "we") graduate.
Interesting. Did students choose by selecting different institutions with different ideas of what should go into that degree, or is there very wide flexibility in course requirements?
I see this claim about how people have “a wrong idea of what economics truly is” all the time when someone criticizes economics, but it's a No True Scotsman fallacy. Economics really is like that, and no it's not being “data driven” it's publication-driven with tons of p-hacking in order to either:
1. fit the author's worldview (these people tend to become the famous ones),
2. or simply get one more paper published to survive the publish-or-perish rat race (the average Joe).
My idea of economics is based on people who are interviewed with “economist” written under their name when they're introduced on screen. Whether it be online or by mainstream news outlets, an economist that agreed with what the creator wants to convey is always easily found.
But that's not the actual science, that's an economist giving opinions on a news show. You can find plenty of examples of physicists giving opinions on lots of things also. Go look on Sabine Hossenfelder's YT channel.
Data driven analytics is more or less useless if you're ideologically driven.
At the end of the day all of our economists are raging capitalists, so they will always approach any data gathered from a capitalist perspective. They will purposefully ignore any other possibilities because they are literally incapable of thinking about them. It's not something they've ever considered or digested.
It's a lot like being car-brained. It's why very smart people keep proposing trains with extra steps but never calling them trains - they can't. Their minds lack the ability to view transportation outside of a car-centric perspective.
Similarly, these economists lack the part of their brain where they can examine economics in a non-capitalist perspective. This is despite the fact that there are zero capitalist countries on Earth. In the US alone, 40% of our GDP comes from government spending. Shh, don't tell the economists!
Paul Romer of the New York Stern School of Business has talked about the crisis of identifiability[1] which makes most macroeconomics non-falsifiable and completely isolates economists from ever being wrong in their theories. He's likened this to the crisis with string theory in physics.
One of the stronger criticisms of Economics as a discipline is that double-blind reviewing of papers is uncommon, and there has been a trend in the past 25 years for the subset of Econ journals that did use double-blind reviewing to move away from it.
Not being an economist, I was surprised to learn this. There are reasons for it, e.g., the prevalence of working papers in the field, but it promotes insularity of ideas and creates an uneven playing field for less well-known and connected researchers.
It's certainly worthy of study. The whole ecosystem of a "science" might be bad at one point in time, and all the practitioners might be wrong, but one day in the future the field could "get it right"!
"she studied philosophy, politics and economics at the University of Oxford, where she was an undergraduate student at New College, achieving a 2:1 Bachelor of Arts degree in June 2000.[8] From 2003 to 2004 she studied for a master's degree in economics at the London School of Economics."
It makes no sense if you treat it as a science. It makes perfect sense if you treat it as a pr department for whichever government or group is funding it. Whether you are a 1890s industrialist or a 1920s Marxist there is an economist for you.
> Economics is the worst social science, an economist is never considered wrong, only of a different “school of economics”. Economists speak as if they have authority and as if their field is objective, but at the same time have those “schools”. Is there such a thing as an unideological economist?
Economics is falsifiable.
For example, a bunch of folks made a prediction ("currency debasement and inflation") when the US Federal reserve started QE:
> We believe the Federal Reserve’s large-scale asset purchase plan (so-called “quantitative easing”) should be reconsidered and discontinued. We do not believe such a plan is necessary or advisable under current circumstances. The planned asset purchases risk currency debasement and inflation, and we do not think they will achieve the Fed’s objective of promoting employment.
A bunch of other folks (e.g., Keynesians like Krugman) made a bunch of prediction as well. One group turned out right, another did not. Another experiment where one group predicted tax cuts would spur growth:
Others predicted it would not, and were right. There was also sorts of folks talking that cutting government spending would spur growth, i.e., "expansionary austerity":
There are "schools" that put forward various models that get it right more than wrong. The fact that some people ignore things for ideological purposes is not the fault of the field in general, or of those that actually try to get their models to match reality.
In fact a lot of the time people know that what they're putting forward is wrong:
> Ronald Reagan launched his 1980 campaign for the presidency on a platform advocating for supply-side economics. During the 1980 Republican Party presidential primaries, George H. W. Bush had derided Reagan's economic approach as "voodoo economics".[23][24] Following Reagan's election, the "trickle-down" reached wide circulation with the publication of "The Education of David Stockman" a December 1981 interview of Reagan's incoming Office of Management and Budget director David Stockman, in the magazine Atlantic Monthly. In the interview, Stockman expressed doubts about supply side economics, telling journalist William Greider that the Kemp–Roth Tax Cut was a way to rebrand a tax cut for the top income bracket to make it easier to pass into law.[25] Stockman said that "It's kind of hard to sell 'trickle down,' so the supply-side formula was the only way to get a tax policy that was really 'trickle down.' Supply-side is 'trickle-down' theory."[25][26][27]
I'm sorry but you can't say that about a field that gave a “Nobel” prize to Fama, shared with Shiller for his work which falsified Fama's.
And your following “effect of QE” example is actually a great example of the problem: pretty much none of the people who made wrong prediction retracted themselves, most of them still believe they were right but the reality just happened to turn otherwise.
> I'm sorry but you can't say that about a field that gave a “Nobel” prize to Fama, shared with Shiller for his work which falsified Fama's.
Or it shows things are complicated.
I once read the remark from a physicist (Feynman?): My job would be much harder if particles had free will.
Which is exactly what economics is trying to model: there are aggregate trends that tend to be followed (on average) by larger number of people, but there are plenty of folks off in the tails of the curve doing strange things (sometimes out of spite: see Gamestop and /r/wallstreetbets).
I participate in personal finance sub-Reddits, and during March 2020 when the world was going sideways, and markets were going crazy (e.g., oil prices went negative) there were a lot of people panicing about their retirement savings. There was a lot of explaining to people that they should not liquidate their investments, but just to ride it out, and you'll be fine over the long run:
A lot of people also learned that they weren't as comfortable with the risk of being in 100% equities as they thought.
Another regular question in those forums "I got an inheritance and want to invest, but markets are at an all-time high." Well, the 'mathematically correct' answer would be to do a lump sum and put it in all at once:
> And your following “effect of QE” example is actually a great example of the problem: pretty much none of the people who made wrong prediction retracted themselves, most of them still believe they were right but the reality just happened to turn otherwise.
Yes. See also Flat Earthers. But their existence does not invalidate the fields geology or astronomy.
This is true in all sorts of areas in life. I live in Ontario, Canada and the provincial government made a controversial splash† recently about ripping out bikes lanes to put in more lanes to improve traffic flow, never mind the decades of data on the topic:
> Yes. See also Flat Earthers. But their existence does not invalidate the fields geology or astronomy.
If flat earthers could become geology university professors then the field would be invalidated instantly, that's exactly my point!
Again the problem isn't that some people say wrong stuff, it's that you can spend your entire career saying fashionable bullshit that gets disproved over and over and face zero consequence in terms of academic reputation. This isn't what science is about, this field is still behaving with the ethos of political philosophy it is born from, not like a science even a social one (History is a good example of how you can do science on societies, and yes this is very different from physics in terms of what kind of knowledge it brings us, but so is biology).
> If flat earthers could become geology university professors then the field would be invalidated instantly, that's exactly my point!
Well then, better invalidate geology:
> Kurt Patrick Wise (born August 1, 1959) is an American geologist, paleontologist,[1] and young Earth creationist who serves as the director of the Creation Research Center at Truett McConnell University in Cleveland, Georgia. He writes in support of creationism and contributed to the Creation Museum in Petersburg, Kentucky.
> Again the problem isn't that some people say wrong stuff, it's that you can spend your entire career saying fashionable bullshit that gets disproved over and over and face zero consequence in terms of academic reputation.
When there are enough folks who believe a certain thing there can be a 'critical mass' for it to become self-sustaining so that there may be consequences from outside the bubble, but the folks in question simply ignore the external groups and live in their own echo chamber. The funding for this can continue because—in the case of economics which touches on (e.g.) tax policy—when there are billions of dollars floating around, and you can fund bullshit so that you get to make more billions and keep more of your billions, there will also be "support" for ideas:
Why do we still hear about climate change not being real? Or that it's real, but not caused by humans? Is climatology a bullshit field? What consequences can there be when oil tycoons throw money at people to keep repeating the same message over and over? How many oil-funded think tanks are there that publish on climate change? Or billionaire-funded think tanks that publish on tax policy?
One reason why you continue to hear about invalid ideas is because to some people truth is irrelevant, reality is irrelevant. The only thing relevant to them is "what can I get?" and they're willing to continue to throw money at getting what they want, and they don't care what is said as long as it gets results:
Here we are in late-2024-going-into-2025 and we're still "debating" the benefits of polio vaccines.
You seem to think that the [Tt]ruth will overcome the [Ll]ies. Maybe. Eventually. But that is the optimistic take—and which I tend to lean towards as well—but I also recognize human psychology and human history, and know that humans can (and do) choose another path. There are plenty of things that true that people choose not to believe in or trust, even with the evidence staring them in the face.
In fact, showing people evidence often prevents people from changing their minds and they makes them dig into their (invalid) beliefs more:
You keep confusing fringes views by weirdos in various field (like your Kurt guy who “serves as the director of the Creation Research Center”) that the broad field regards with a mix of contempt and pity, and only exist because it benefits from backing from outside the science world (mostly for religious reasons), and economists where the same kind of people get the biggest number of citations in paper and are granted the most prestigious award (and where the said award is a counterfeit one, “Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Memory of Alfred Nobel” pretending to be a “Nobel prize”).
If you don't see the difference (and can't articulate your arguments without annoying walls of text), it's time to end this discussion.
> turn towards qualitative methods and epistemologies that are either misaligned with or explicitly reject the scientific method.
At least you can see their questionable method upfront, and can disagree with it.
Economics is worse: it has become completely quantitative, with sophisticated mathematics. I’ve heard the approach referred to as ‘physics envy’
It appears unapproachable to a non-expert and authoritative. But it’s not like physics
It’s conclusions are often catastrophically wrong because all the mathematics relies on shaky qualitative assumptions: people are perfectly rational, etc.
For example we have published economic research that forecasts that severe climate change will only damage global GDP by 1%.
They conclude that farming productivity will be reduced by 25% and farming is 4% of global GDP, so it’s 1%. Then they model some effect on the consumer because food prices go up.
It does not occur to the authors to model impact of physical result of that, which is, famine and political instability that comes with it.
It is not just that they are wrong, they are intentionally wrong. Someone wants that 1% number and economists will happily deliver. If someone wanted to pay for a study saying it would affect gdp by 50% they would get it.
This is the great illustration of the hokey thinking that happens in economics. They don't focus on modeling humans as agentic systems. What happens if GDP is pushed to 1000%, 10,000%? When there is so much agricultural production that food is free? How does that affect geopolitics, human social values and demands? It's clear to me the models completely breakdown and are really only epsilon valid (e.g okay for modeling small, but not catastrophic pertrubations)
Maybe I’m wired differently, but what you’re describing sounds like estimation, so I’d expect that they’ve made some underlying assumptions, foresight being imperfect and all.
I’m unclear what you’re arguing for here, that we should not attempt to estimate because we have to make some assumptions about future events? Or is it that the estimators in this case should have used different assumptions? Or is it that they should also be estimating the potential for famines and political instability (which maybe they don’t feel qualified to do?)
That assertion is due to the incorrect assumption that we can’t feed everyone on the planet if farming becomes less productive than it is today, and ignores that we currently produce very large food surpluses.
> They conclude that farming productivity will be reduced by 25% and farming is 4% of global GDP, so it’s 1%. Then they model some effect on the consumer because food prices go up.
> It does not occur to the authors to model impact of physical result of that, which is, famine and political instability that comes with it.
> incorrect assumption that we can’t feed everyone on the planet
You are the one making incorrect assumptions, specifically that food production is a steady and constant process like producing iPhones.
In the real world, crops fail due to seasonal weather all the time and it affects global food prices.
Research predicts multiple famines due to simultaneous crop failures in global bread baskets. That’s why responsible countries like Norway started stockpiling food.
The point is not even that - economists are simply not qualified to assess accuracy of their base assumptions.
now I have to debate people who claim we should not address climate change because worst case is 1% damage to GDP.
What are the report margins on that? Suppose there is a 10% chance that the drop is higher, like 30%/35% and does cause a famine specifically concentrated in the US, or nuclear armed Pakistan, and Global GDP falls by 40%.
Have you seen them report finds the n a way that accounts for, however small; possibility of total disaster?
That article has no mention of famines. The article is about supply chains and price shocks and using stockpiles of grain as “buffers” to soften sudden price swings. It makes sense: Grain in one place can’t feed people in another unless it can move through the supply chain.
> Research predicts multiple famines due to simultaneous crop failures.
Economics, sociology, psychology, even ecology in relation to humans are all really one subject. Then to make matters worse we are using the tools of reductionist linear science to study the already artificial subsets of this subject as independent, stationary, ergodic chunks, leading to obviously ridiculous conclusions when these chunks are reassembled.
Then somehow complex systems and non-linear dynamics has really failed to gain any traction in the popular discourse. Labeling the subject "Chaos theory" in the 80s was really really dumb.
On the other hand, the popular mind has a delusional view of science. As if there is an efficient market hypothesis for scientific truth. That scientific truth is instantaneously transmitted and discounted.
This is all just one of the many examples from history happening in real time of a decades long Kuhnian paradigm shift while the popular mind continues to argue outdated nonsense like the best way to measure aether and phlogiston.
Hmm. Are you familiar enough with research in economics, or the hard sciences, to say that all the work in those disciplines lack an emphasis on “generalizable findings”?
It feels like epistemic weaksauce to claim that entire fields explicitly reject the goal of generalizable knowledge because they question or reject “the scientific method” on the basis of “I’ve read some case study / qualitative papers”.
It is always amazing to me how many people are willing to say "wow this entire academic field is just garbage and the researchers are making some incredibly childish error" based on what seems just entirely like vibes.
Psych is getting a brunt of this because they have actually done a good thing and funded replication studies, which naturally will produce a bunch of "this fails to replicate" findings. So then you get headlines talking about the replication crisis in psych and then people who maybe took a single class in college a decade ago dismiss the entire field as bogus.
I invite such people to go speak with some CS academics for a better understanding of the mess in our own field.
And yet I did not state this, and it seems you're rounding my position to an easier one to dismiss.
I don't reject non-scientific scholarship. But I see the focus in some disciplines a little like twinkies and soda: a bit of them can be fine and maybe even be good in some circumstances (brings joy; maybe as a recovery item for some diabetic conditions). But my feeling is that some of these disciplines have indexed a bit too much on twinkie and soda.
Sorry, I missed your comment / didn't realize it was directed specifically at me. So, if you go back and read what I wrote:
1. I definitely did not say that economics does not strive for generalizability. Quite the contrary. I think the vast majority of economists strive for generalizable conclusions (i.e. go to great care to find study samples that are representative of the population of interest and use statistical methods that might allow them to plausibly conclude things about that group)
2. I never said "all" work in other social science disciplines rejects generalizability as an aim. However, I do believe, that more "empirical" scientific method based studies in a number of disciplines would be good. That is predicated on 1. a belief about the prevalence of qualitative/theory based scholarship. 2. a normative preference that the ratio is undesirable. I could be mistaken on my perception of the first point, but I don't think I am. On the second point, you're welcome to disagree. These are, like, opinions, man!
3. "reject the goal of generalizable knowledge because they question or reject 'the scientific method'" makes me think you've either missed my point, or you don't understand the nature of other forms of academic scholarship.
I'm not leveling a diss that e.g. a participant observation case study isn't a method intended to generalize from. That's just an intrinsic feature of that kind of study method. Of the qualitative researchers I've known, I can't imagine any thinking there is anything controversial about what I've said on that point. Though, some would definitely disagree with me on my opinions about what ratio of scholarship should be of this kind.
And lastly you've selectively quoted me there at the end, and attached a conclusion to it that is not mine. Consider this a bit of original qualitative research on my part: a sampling of non-empirical research that I've read in recent years has suggested to me a lapse in rigor in certain disciplines. But this conclusion is grounded in my "situated knowledge" of the space, and thus shouldn't be used to generalize without a suitably operationalized quantitative study ;-)
I'm sorry, but the thrust of your earlier post was absolutely that the social sciences "have taken a pretty hard turn" and "might benefit from a renewed emphasis on methods that can result in generalizable findings", and that "a correction is warranted".
Pragmatically speaking, I'm unsure why you would choose this language if you wished to convey the nuance that qualitative methods are actually great, that you're merely wishing that more "empirical" studies would also be undertaken, where "empirical" I guess means "quantitative" and "rigorous" though you don't make that explicit.
For what it's worth, you absolutely can generalize from an observational case study. RCTs are not the only way of drawing generalizable conclusions—it depends a lot on what your epistemic goals are.
It kind of sounds like you don't like that some social sciences rely more on non-quantitative methods because you don't think those are definitive. That's fine, you're welcome to hold that belief, but let's not pretend like you're a fan of all methods and just wish there were a few more quantitative studies in sociology (or whichever discipline).
No need to be sorry, I think you're letting your priors overwhelm your understanding of what I'm writing. What if I don't think that these methods are irredeemable or useless or epistemologically bankrupt, and STILL think that a bunch of disciplines in the social sciences over use them and could benefit from a course correction?
Does that resolve what I think you are perceiving to be a contradiction, but that I do not see as a contradiction?
Where I think you and I have a fundamental disagreement is in the nature of e.g. qualitative research methods such as case studies and whether a case study is generalizable. This feature was taught to me by... qualitative researchers. If you truly believe a case study is a generalizable research method, then either you are defining generalizability in a different way than is typical, or you hold a minority viewpoint not shared by mainline qualitative researchers.
Not all research methods need to be generalizable to have some scholarship value, and I'm not using the concept of generalizability as a colloquial stand-in for ~"bad"
BUT, I still think social sciences could use fewer qualitative studies and pure theory grounded scholarship (i.e. "a correction is warranted"). It's what I said from the start, it's what I mean now, and unless I someone provides me a compelling rationale to change my mind or the world changes, it'll probably be what I believe going forward.
It seems important to you to attribute to me a total rejection / disparagement of these methods. I am just not saying this. I do not reject these methods, just as I do not reject apple pie. I just don't think that a steady diet of apple pie is good. And I don't think the research methodology diet of many social sciences is healthy either. A correction is warranted.
Hmm, alright, sure: Pick a field. What would the shift you are proposing look like in that field? What’s the ratio now between qualitative work and quantitative work, and what ratio would you like it to be, post-correction?
What will be the outcome of that shift? Some kind of better research?
On what basis do you think that field should agree with your perception?
On what basis do you think your perception is correct?
Note that I’m using “qualitative” and “quantitative” as stand-ins for whatever you think there’s too much of and too little of, respectively—please feel free to clarify if these words don’t effectively capture what you are trying to say.
It’s not at all important to me to attribute to you a “total rejection” of these methods, your writing implies to me that you have a preference for quant methods and think they’re better. You’re not, for example, complaining about too much quant methodology in economics, and too little qualitative. Sure, you don’t think that qual methods are bad per se, but you do think that the social sciences could use fewer of them, and that they’re overused.
I imagine you would agree that these methods can tell us different things, and that they’re not interchangeable for any given research question. You’d probably also agree that some fields bias towards certain types of questions, and that maybe the ratio of methods of work in a given field reflects the bias towards questions that are best answered by those methods. So, are you suggesting that entire fields should focus more on different questions, specifically those that can be answered quantitatively?
If not, I’m not sure I understand what the implications of your argument are.
For what it’s worth, here’s my bias: I am both a quantitative and a qualitative researcher, and I actually think the underlying issues holding back the production of generalizable knowledge have little to do with choice of methodology, and to the extent that they do, it’s in part due to a fetishization of quantitative methods that tell us something generalizable—but not necessarily something useful or even something true.
All changes to the status quo can have political repercussions. But there is a difference between a change that is a byproduct of someone trying to do what is right in a given situation vs a change that someone is making directly relating to external ideological processes.
For this example, was the decision made by academics who analyzed the situation and felt that some aspects of study were underfunded? Or was it outsiders who entered the process with a specific objective and didn’t bother with the details so long as their ideological objectives were achieved?
Geography, sociology, anthropology for starters. Take a read about postmodern epistemologies. See how many papers draw on "pure theory". I even saw this in my required coursework prior to dropping out of a PhD in urban planning.
can you point to a specific example of a geography program turning away from the scientific method? I've seen postmodernism and deconstructivism applied to architecture and rhetoric, but as convoluted and ultimately non-explanatory as I found them, they were still based in the formal ideas of cause and effect, and experimental approaches to theories.
Without diving into my personal experiences with a specific department, I invite you to take a look at google scholar for peer reviewed publications grounded in theory approaches such as queer theory and critical theory in geographic studies: https://scholar.google.com/scholar?hl=en&as_sdt=0%2C48&q=que...
Also please note that me calling these theories non-scientific is not a colloquial dig at them. I'm speaking precisely that the literature contributing to these theories explicitly and frequently opposes the scientific method as a tool of oppression. Even though I believe in (bounded) rationality, I do agree with this viewpoint in part. Science, as practiced by fallible humans, can be used for bad things! But, where I disagree with critical theory and its children, is that this somehow delegitimizes scientific epistemology.
A specific publication I remember reading years ago as an assigned reading cites, as a limitation of the paper their use of the Cartesian plane in mapping, as the Cartesian plane is incompatible with queer theory: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/000456007017340...
the existence of a couple of papers that some people got published doesn't meet the bar of a discipline turning against the scientific method. Could you please try again?
Did you bother to click the google scholar link? Several dozen pages of results that fit the mold and you call it "a couple of papers"? I don't want to assume you are trolling, but seriously.
your link was simply for a google search for 'queer theory critical theory geography'. Because 'geography' is an overloaded word that both refers to a formal discipline about the physical world (mapping, terrain, elevation, boundaries, borders, GIS) and also the concept of exploratory investigation in analytical thinking, the search finds a lot of earnest cases of people talking about the concepts of gender, some cases about whether geography-as-a-subject is over-fixated on imperial origin, and to my counting, zero cases of geography as a discipline abandoning the scientific method. So your initial assertion remains unconvincing. Please feel free to name a specific department if that helps.
It's easy to make fun of some of the overwrought academic papers that are out there. Nevertheless if you're a huge fan of the scientific method and rigorous thinking, as you seem to claim that you are, then making your own overwrought and specious claims about the issue is not a way to solve the problem.
The parent post talks about "recent years". Postmodernism being in any way dominant hasn't been a thing (in American universities) since the late 80s or maybe early 90s. The common approach these days is theoretical pluralism.
If so, then it seems to me that there's much more nuance than "mythology as science". Certainly there are aspects of traditional knowledge that deal directly with facts and therefore could be in conflict with science. However, that's not the same as recognizing that different cultures can have different ways of understanding and thinking about the world. Understanding those different ways of understanding could be a valuable tool in allowing society to develop creative approaches to problems.
Science did not spring forth like athena from zeus' head.
In their historical context, tools that we would now consider to be wildly unscientific (like oracles to gods or various alchemical practices) were intertwined deeply with scientific practice. It is not unreasonable to draw these kinds of connections in research. I know some people doing interesting work connecting ancient cipher technology with various divination techniques.
Just because these techniques don't work doesn't mean that they aren't relevant to understanding why things are the way they are today.
This. Actually, I've observed the opposite way more often in EU academic circles: Humanistic studies parroting STEM quantitative approaches in fields where it's useless or even ridiculous - Think the "poetic mathematical analysis" at the beginning of Dead Poets Society.
This is public/state controlled funding. Also it is reserving it for "research with economic benefits." New Zealand isn't a rich country. Also private entities can fund research. It is common in the US for chemical companies to fund grants. For example, to determine what chemicals are in breast milk.
One of New Zealand's problems is that, yes it's a rich country compared to many others but it's conveniently close to a bigger richer country with easy immigration for NZ citizens. Record numbers of kiwis are moving to Australia where wages are higher and prices are usually lower. The "brain drain" is very real and quite concerning.
I'm a kiwi living in the US so admittedly I'm not helping matters but I do worry about my home country being on a slippery slope.
> Also private entities can fund research. It is common in the US for chemical companies to fund grants.
It's also common in the US for companies to fund research so that they can manipulate results to their benefit and/or to bury results showing that their products are harmful. One of the many nice things about publicly funded research is that its purpose isn't to increase sales/stock prices, advertise, or manipulate/hide the truth from the public.
> In short, I think a correction is warranted, but I hate to see it happen as part of a charged ideological / political process.
That’s a bad heuristic. When something is failing, that approach’s ideological proponents will continue to defend it, while the ideological opponents will call out the shortcomings. That’s just how everything works. You should evaluate whether or not the thing is working on its own merits, not based on who is leveling the criticism.
> Some disciplines in the social sciences in recent years have taken a pretty hard turn towards qualitative methods and epistemologies that are either misaligned with or explicitly reject the scientific method.
Hard to see a social science field that fits this description better than economics though…
What incentive is there to fix it if funding isn't cut? And how else do you think funding can be cut that isn't a "charged ideological / political process"?
I suspect you are right that economics will survive cuts. Not that it is any more of a science but because it is basically a propaganda arm for the establishment. This is true whether that establishment is died in the wool Marxists or libertarian free market absolutists.
The social sciences are not science and good riddance to them.
They are religious rituals with only the trappings of the scientific method. These rituals are often purely performative, but the outcomes can be useful for effecting political goals, as the studies have historically given authoritative weight to bureaucrats and their designs.
The ruse is failing though, and I think New Zealand's actions here could be evidence of this trend. No longer is "studies show..." a sufficient enough deception for enacting political ends. People are demanding sounder reasoning in politics than what Scientism has to offer.
Most invocations of Scientism are directed at these social sciences, due to its egregiousness.
Some disciplines in the social sciences in recent years have taken a pretty hard turn towards qualitative methods and epistemologies that are either misaligned with or explicitly reject the scientific method.
I think dropping funding for social sciences is a mistake, but at the same time (and I'm tipping my hand a bit here), the social sciences might benefit from a renewed emphasis on methods that can result in generalizable findings. I've read some case study / qualitative papers in recent years that, uh, do not give me the strong impression that some parts of the academy are serious stewards of the funding society entrusts to them.
In short, I think a correction is warranted, but I hate to see it happen as part of a charged ideological / political process.