Magic Poriferan
^He pronks, too!
- Joined
- Nov 4, 2007
- Messages
- 14,081
- MBTI Type
- Yin
- Enneagram
- One
- Instinctual Variant
- sx/sp
Entries like the one I wrote before this make me somewhat uncomfortable. It makes me uncomfortable when I say anything like that. Even when I'm very confident that I'm right, I hate dwelling on, and especially displaying, the fear and the hostility that saturate that post. I believe in being rational, and relying on critical thinking, and I have an inherent revulsion to political bluster that applies to myself as much as anyone else. I can only defend my position by saying that I do believe it to be true and that I did not hop on that stance over-night or simply by referral from someone else. I've thought about those things for quite a while before making my decision. However, thinking about them in academically economic terms is something kind of new to me.
So that brings this entry to the main subject, of what I hope will be several entries that are much less passionate than the last one.
I'm a sociology major, and though sometimes the prospects don't look good, I decided years ago that I wanted to get a PhD and become a professor. I am something of an autodidactic intellectual factotum. That extremely pretentious description (which you might expect to hear from Ray or Egon in Ghostbusters) simply means I like teaching myself about many different subjects. Well outside of sociology, logic, ethics, genetics, and zoology are some of my favorites. But it is probably fair to say that I focus more in general on social sciences (or social studies if you think it is flattery to call them sciences as of yet) more than other fields. So, I'm into psychology, anthropology, political-science, history (up in the air, some call that a humanity) and so forth. But the one social study I never really took to like the others is economics.
I have recently been taking much more interest in economics. It's been driven by a dual frustration, namely my frustration with what I sense are major flaws or oversights in the reasoning I hear from people who have supposedly studied economics, and frustration in my own inability to articulate my ideas in economics terms or really feel confident that I can figure anything out myself.
There was a Pew poll fairly recently that found that atheists and agnostics were typically more educated about religion than people of faith. There were two sort of opposite order explanations for this. One is that people who were more informed and better critical thinkers were more likely to be non-religious because these things made one more aware of the factual errors and logical contradictions in religion. The reverse order was that people who were raised on faith, and started departing from it, were spurred into studying a lot more and doing more critical thinking. Both may very well be true, and form a cycle.
I bring it up because I feel like a person who's in the the second category, the person who's break from faith is causing a sudden increase in studying and inquiry. But if I'm one of those people, I'm not into the stage of being more educated than the believer yet. I'm still in the much more frustrating and less comfortable position of now being strongly convinced that what I'm told is very wrong, but lack a confident understanding of what is wrong with it, and certainly what is the right alternative. I know the religion is a lie, but I don't have a good case against it yet.
Not that I was ever raised on any economic ideology. My family never really gave me any economic ideas, and I myself was simply in the dark about economics before I started taking this recent interest. I knew too little to even think I should attempt arguing what I heard about economics. How it is that I ever got into these economic discussions comes down to my knowledge in other social studies. My knowledge in those fields are where my seeds of doubt appeared. I heard things come from those speaking on economics which overlapped with my studies, and in some cases contradicted what seemed to be very normal premises in other fields. For example, to tell a sociologist that inequality of wealth is a relatively minor factor in the shape of a society will make you seem like an imbecile to that sociologist. And yet, I heard that from plenty of people who spoke like economic hot-shots. Inequality was brushed aside as small potatoes, one of the little things.
So, that's the reason why I've been getting into arguments on economics long before I started directly studying economics much. Someone stepped out of their academic turf, into mine, into the wrong spot. This did cause me to slowly, gradually pick some economics ideas, but my efforts in studying economics has had a hyperbolic trend, so that is has now sharply increased in just the past few months.
What economic ideas have I been hearing that made so many statements I found contradictory to what I knew of other social studies? I've been told by libertarians that Keynesian economics is still the economic mainstream. If it is, then nobody likes talking about the economic mainstream, because I hardly heard about Keynesian economics all these years. When I did, it was from someone mention it to described how wrong it is. The Wikipedia article on the neoclassical school of economics currently dominates microeconomics, and is
synthesized with New Keynesian economics in a product that then dominates macroeconomics. That sounds more accurate to my experience, because I hear constantly about Neoclassical economics, and it is where I've heard a lot of this content that sets off my bullshit alarms. The other one is so-called supply-side economics. I also heard a ton of that, and it also constantly set off my bullshit alarms.
But again, I'm back to my position of sensing the bullshit, but often not knowing how to counter in economic terms. As I've developed understanding of what these schools are about, I have indeed found that supply-side economics strike me as hollow, neoclassicism has some worthwhile stuff but also things that strike me as terminal flaws. And then there's the Austrian school, which, long before I studied this, I already surmised to be total rubbish. The Austrian school would be enemy number one for me. I have a lot more studying to do, but the Chicago school appears to me to be the Austrian school with a big, puffy, government monetary policy, so I'm not very impressed with it either. But what of the other fields? I'm always so much better at negating than positing. I can wipe ideas off the consideration board left and right, but I find it very hard to become confident in a prediction or a prescription. There appears to have been a great exodus from Keynesian economics in the 70s or so, as a result of it totally denying the potential existence of stagflation. That seems like a good reason to have doubts, but then it seems to have lead to an increase in popularity of all these schools that I find more clearly flawed.
So is my future in some kind of New Keynesian economics, since the rest aren't impressing me? Well, I'm never one to completely submit to a prepackaged philosophy anyhow. It may be, though, that my theories lean much more toward Keynesian economics than the other stuff. Something that is quite sad, however, is that no prominent economic school in this country seems to avoid ignorance about inequality. None of them really treat that as much of an issue, and that makes me somewhat at odds with them all. The one exception I've been reading about is this Institutional economics. It looks broad and cumbersome, but so far is the only one I've read about that seems to address what strike me as certain obvious things. Again, I need to study more, but it appears less than the other schools to succumb to the economist stereotype of discussing pristine ideas in a theoretical vacuum of no practical use.
As it stands, I'm left searching for answers while I swat off the persistence of those who I've already decided don't have them. The libertarians, in their many forms and varying economic theories, still generally fall under the category of people who I've decided don't have the answer. I've said before that as a sociologist, I cannot believe the things they tell me, and my conviction that they are misguided can be credited as the very thing which as vaulted me into studying economics now.
So that brings this entry to the main subject, of what I hope will be several entries that are much less passionate than the last one.
I'm a sociology major, and though sometimes the prospects don't look good, I decided years ago that I wanted to get a PhD and become a professor. I am something of an autodidactic intellectual factotum. That extremely pretentious description (which you might expect to hear from Ray or Egon in Ghostbusters) simply means I like teaching myself about many different subjects. Well outside of sociology, logic, ethics, genetics, and zoology are some of my favorites. But it is probably fair to say that I focus more in general on social sciences (or social studies if you think it is flattery to call them sciences as of yet) more than other fields. So, I'm into psychology, anthropology, political-science, history (up in the air, some call that a humanity) and so forth. But the one social study I never really took to like the others is economics.
I have recently been taking much more interest in economics. It's been driven by a dual frustration, namely my frustration with what I sense are major flaws or oversights in the reasoning I hear from people who have supposedly studied economics, and frustration in my own inability to articulate my ideas in economics terms or really feel confident that I can figure anything out myself.
There was a Pew poll fairly recently that found that atheists and agnostics were typically more educated about religion than people of faith. There were two sort of opposite order explanations for this. One is that people who were more informed and better critical thinkers were more likely to be non-religious because these things made one more aware of the factual errors and logical contradictions in religion. The reverse order was that people who were raised on faith, and started departing from it, were spurred into studying a lot more and doing more critical thinking. Both may very well be true, and form a cycle.
I bring it up because I feel like a person who's in the the second category, the person who's break from faith is causing a sudden increase in studying and inquiry. But if I'm one of those people, I'm not into the stage of being more educated than the believer yet. I'm still in the much more frustrating and less comfortable position of now being strongly convinced that what I'm told is very wrong, but lack a confident understanding of what is wrong with it, and certainly what is the right alternative. I know the religion is a lie, but I don't have a good case against it yet.
Not that I was ever raised on any economic ideology. My family never really gave me any economic ideas, and I myself was simply in the dark about economics before I started taking this recent interest. I knew too little to even think I should attempt arguing what I heard about economics. How it is that I ever got into these economic discussions comes down to my knowledge in other social studies. My knowledge in those fields are where my seeds of doubt appeared. I heard things come from those speaking on economics which overlapped with my studies, and in some cases contradicted what seemed to be very normal premises in other fields. For example, to tell a sociologist that inequality of wealth is a relatively minor factor in the shape of a society will make you seem like an imbecile to that sociologist. And yet, I heard that from plenty of people who spoke like economic hot-shots. Inequality was brushed aside as small potatoes, one of the little things.
So, that's the reason why I've been getting into arguments on economics long before I started directly studying economics much. Someone stepped out of their academic turf, into mine, into the wrong spot. This did cause me to slowly, gradually pick some economics ideas, but my efforts in studying economics has had a hyperbolic trend, so that is has now sharply increased in just the past few months.
What economic ideas have I been hearing that made so many statements I found contradictory to what I knew of other social studies? I've been told by libertarians that Keynesian economics is still the economic mainstream. If it is, then nobody likes talking about the economic mainstream, because I hardly heard about Keynesian economics all these years. When I did, it was from someone mention it to described how wrong it is. The Wikipedia article on the neoclassical school of economics currently dominates microeconomics, and is
synthesized with New Keynesian economics in a product that then dominates macroeconomics. That sounds more accurate to my experience, because I hear constantly about Neoclassical economics, and it is where I've heard a lot of this content that sets off my bullshit alarms. The other one is so-called supply-side economics. I also heard a ton of that, and it also constantly set off my bullshit alarms.
But again, I'm back to my position of sensing the bullshit, but often not knowing how to counter in economic terms. As I've developed understanding of what these schools are about, I have indeed found that supply-side economics strike me as hollow, neoclassicism has some worthwhile stuff but also things that strike me as terminal flaws. And then there's the Austrian school, which, long before I studied this, I already surmised to be total rubbish. The Austrian school would be enemy number one for me. I have a lot more studying to do, but the Chicago school appears to me to be the Austrian school with a big, puffy, government monetary policy, so I'm not very impressed with it either. But what of the other fields? I'm always so much better at negating than positing. I can wipe ideas off the consideration board left and right, but I find it very hard to become confident in a prediction or a prescription. There appears to have been a great exodus from Keynesian economics in the 70s or so, as a result of it totally denying the potential existence of stagflation. That seems like a good reason to have doubts, but then it seems to have lead to an increase in popularity of all these schools that I find more clearly flawed.
So is my future in some kind of New Keynesian economics, since the rest aren't impressing me? Well, I'm never one to completely submit to a prepackaged philosophy anyhow. It may be, though, that my theories lean much more toward Keynesian economics than the other stuff. Something that is quite sad, however, is that no prominent economic school in this country seems to avoid ignorance about inequality. None of them really treat that as much of an issue, and that makes me somewhat at odds with them all. The one exception I've been reading about is this Institutional economics. It looks broad and cumbersome, but so far is the only one I've read about that seems to address what strike me as certain obvious things. Again, I need to study more, but it appears less than the other schools to succumb to the economist stereotype of discussing pristine ideas in a theoretical vacuum of no practical use.
As it stands, I'm left searching for answers while I swat off the persistence of those who I've already decided don't have them. The libertarians, in their many forms and varying economic theories, still generally fall under the category of people who I've decided don't have the answer. I've said before that as a sociologist, I cannot believe the things they tell me, and my conviction that they are misguided can be credited as the very thing which as vaulted me into studying economics now.
