Some genius takes:
The whole Global North/South split is a pet peeve of mine as a social scientist working in development policy. It’s a bunch of outdated garbage from the Cold War that was really just a thinly veiled dogwhistle for ‘white/the good Asians’ and ‘not white’. It doesn’t hold up to any rational examination. South Africa was part of the Global North until white rule under Apartheid ended, and now they’re in the Global South. southern nations.
Real educated economist chimes in:
Jason Hickel is an anthropologist (read: not economist) and degrowther. Despite having no background and seemingly almost no understanding of economics as a field, he somehow continues to get ‘economics’ papers published in reputable journals despite their obvious low quality. But to anyone with a cursory understanding of economics, it should be entirely unsurprising that exports from developing nations to developed are more labor intensive than vice-versa. This is not a novel conclusion and is not ‘appropriation’, but is entirely explained by a concept in economics called comparative advantage.
Another genius owns the article epic style
This paper is a demonstration of why input-output (IO) models are bad for economic research. IO models were used by the soviet central planners to allocate resources. IO models are bad for research for the same reason the are bad for planning. The authors look at “embodied labor” (adjusted for human capital), the idea being that any two things produced by an hour of (human capital adjusted) labor must have the same value (btw, this “labor theory of value” goes back to Adam Smith, and was later promulgated by Marx).
Other facts that the authors’ framework will struggle to explain: why is it that the poor countries that most integrated with global trade networks became rich (s korea, Japan, Singapore) or are otherwise growing quickly (china, Panama, Vietnam)? Why is it that countries with severe barriers to trade with the global north struggle to grow (n Korea, India for second half of 20th century)? That’s very hard to explain if trade with the global north is fundamentally exploitative.
Extra rich that they’re whining about him being an anthropologist, when if economics was treated as being a serious academic field and not a hype man for capital, it would be considered a subset of anthropology or sociology.
Holy shit you’re right I can’t believe I never made that connection before. The gulf in the worldviews of anthropologists and economists is probably one of the biggest in academia, crazy how that works
Economics, I’m pretty sure, started out as a “soft” social science. But since it used math (and math can’t be trusted :fry:) it was a very good vehicle for making “objective” arguments for doing inhumane things.
It doesn’t even use math. It pretends to use math then gets pissy and throws out results when reality doesn’t fit into it’s wank-ass prediction curves, like the inflation-unemployment curve which is still taught as a real thing in econ 101, and it isnt until you get into behavioral economics that they start to drop hints that maybe they are wrong on some of their assumptions.
I literally just had a conversation with a PhD in economics where he (while drunk) admitted to me that they have no real idea what is going on in the economy writ large or have any actually consistent principals or practices. Very fun, definitely not worrying stuff.
It’s always pissed me off how economists want us to believe that the childish graphs they scribbled on the back of a napkin are real. They’re literally just straight lines in a void based on vibes. Can you imagine if any other science tried doing that?
🤓 Here is the Phase Diagram for all materials. Yes, all materials. If you heat things up, they evaporate, it’s very intuitive. I am a real scientist and you should use this chart to inform your worldview.
Ummm I heard soviet scientists also had some state of matter called fluid?
That’s been debunked. I hope you’re getting paid for spreading Russian propaganda.
Philosophical statements dressed up in Cartesian graphs in order to make them look math-y.
Another good example is how many Econ 101 classes teach that banks need to draw from holdings in order to issue loans, as if leverage isn’t a thing.
There’s a whole field of economics dedicated to figuring out whether or not we are in a recession at the current moment. They can’t even tell what is going on in the present, yet they claim to be able to determine what the future brings
I no… it absolutely uses “math”… I sat in the classes. But the equations are like me throwing chicken bones to see what tomorrow’s weather is going to be.
They dress that shit up with a fancy latin phrase “ceteris paribus” like its a fuckin mic drop.
To be less perjorative and more specific, It has very little relationship to more exact scientific statistical assessment (which is what most people mean they think about ‘STEM math’) that is for sure. The math is more like straight fuckin around with formulas mathematics.
They actually do lots of serious economic studies in anthropology, usually focusing on reciprocal or 'gift economies", but there are also several studies on ‘energy economies’ that literally tries to track joul usage through a societal system. Fun stuff, very complicated.
Anthropology is filthy with marxists. Hell, someone went and worked at Bear Stearns or something and actually did anthropology directly at wall street dorks back in the early 00s. Can’t remember what the book is called though. : (
I’ve read that book! It was something about the culture of management bureaucracy, but if I remember correctly it basically said their entire communication structure was fraught with just people lying to each other.
I think the most interesting part, if I remember correctly, would be that people would lie to each other, then convince themselves they had told the truth.
Swimming with the sharks?
Well, no, sharks aren’t really dangerous.
The name of the book I mean. I now of a book that correspond to your description and is called something like “swimming with the sharks” I think.
Ahh, gotcha.
Extra extra rich that that particular commentator doesn’t actually have much of an understanding of bourgeois economics beyond “Econ 101”.
“Didn’t these idiots study Econ 101?” Is a common refrain, yet somehow they never consider the embarrassing fact that they are admitting to having a surface-level understanding of Economics at best. Yeah commies studied econ 101 and then also 102 and so on and so forth
It absolutely would not. The social sciences’ standards might be low, but we still have standards. Those assholes can go form their own branch of the sciences somewhere else.