• schroedingershat@lemmy.world
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    1 year ago

    The economist’s fundamental assumptions are wrong. The free market rational actor model is wholly incompatible with the ability of a finance or marketing industry to exist because marketing could never inform or convince anyone of anything and contracts can provide anything financialisation does without giving 10% of your income to someone who did nkthing. Given that both exist and together dominate the industry of the wealthiest countries, we know that none of it is real, and that the people pushing it also know this.

    Psychology and physics are founded in empiricism, not post-hoc rationalisations of what the powerful wanted to do anyway.

    • hakase@lemm.ee
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      1 year ago

      The economist’s fundamental assumptions are wrong. The free market rational actor model is wholly incompatible with the ability of a finance or marketing industry to exist because marketing could never inform or convince anyone of anything and contracts can provide anything financialisation does without giving 10% of your income to someone who did nkthing.

      This is either an intentional strawman of economic theory or a naive understanding based off a single Intro to Economics class.

      It’s like arguing that physics’ fundamental assumptions are wrong because basic physics problems assume that cows are spheres with no air resistance.

      Psychology and physics are founded in empiricism

      A significant amount of modern economic research is empiricist, but even if it weren’t, empiricism and rationalism go hand-in-hand in scientific inquiry. Rationalism is what allowed Mendel to posit “units of inheritance” over a century before the existence of DNA was empirically verified, and Schwarzschild to posit the existence of black holes almost a century before black holes’ gravitational waves were first measured. Decades of productive research were had in advance of these empirical discoveries thanks to models built on rationalist inquiry, so “it’s not empiricist” isn’t quite the insult you seem to think it is.

          • schroedingershat@lemmy.world
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            1 year ago

            Oh. You were serious with the “it doesn’t matter if it conflicts with reality if I thought a bit because it’s ‘rational’ and directly contradicting reality is the same as an approximation” schtick?

            I don’t know if that sad or even funnier.

            • hakase@lemm.ee
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              1 year ago

              Ah, I see that I’ve made the mistake of engaging in this conversation in good faith when that was never your intention. I won’t make that mistake with you again.

              • schroedingershat@lemmy.world
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                1 year ago

                If air pollution policy was set based on assuming all humans are spherical cows in a vacuum, you might have a coherent point, but when the dominant controlling power in your field is based on the assertion that we should just remove the air to make reality more like the models then your field is a laughing stock.

                If I posit for a moment that you actually come from a sub-field interested in describing reality rather than altering reality to suit the wealthy, then you should rename what you do or get rid of the ones giving you a bad name. Clean up your shit or call what you do if you want to be taken seriously. Otherwise you get to be lumped in with the feckless ghouls your field holds up as experts.