RE: Academic Wank and the conservative backlash

David,
I am an EE Specialising in Radio engineering, so you are preaching to the choir about symbols. I couldn’t live without them.

I do however get a bit jaded about revered symbols that are nothing more than symbols. Like soldiers who are prepared to get killed to save a flag. The flag is a symbol of something great, but it is really just a rag that is easily replaced and not worth getting hurt for. In fact all military ceremonial and even religious ceremonial leaves me cold. Symbols intended to motivate are usually harmful bullshit. I would rather get excited about something real.

Economics makes most sense to me when it uses symbols and mathematics, but I still regard it as a pseudo science. That is not to say it does not need scientific thinking, but rather that it lacks scientific rigor. The assumptions are so heroic that they often cannot support the conclusions being drawn. Predictions are often vague and usually come with a get out of jail free card: “Don’t blame me because real environments are more complex than our theoretical or model ones.” Politics is never very far away from macro economics and the public policy considerations that accompany it. Therefore much of the economics discourse is highly conflicted by party politics.

I find that economists are often talking about rates of change but usually don’t seem to understand that the proper language for that is calculus. Instead of a few precise equations they play with the slope of the lines on their graphs and draw general conclusions from special cases and oversimplified straight line models

Markets are a good example. They almost never work as the economists expect them to, and so they spend most of their energy explaining the reasons for market failure and creating regulations, and even special regulators, to try to make them work. The symbols show price adjusting to match supply and demand but actually there is usually some undefined amont of friction caused by things such as barriers to entry, monopolistic behavior, investment uncertainty, etc.

These sort of people are now going to saddle us with a Carbon Trading scheme which is a desperate attempt to create a market for something that no one wants: pollution. Everything is so artificial, and the sharp business types will no doubt find a way to make money out of this market without doing anything to help the environment. The costs to us all will be much higher than if they simply taxed carbon emissions in proportion to volume. Taxes benefit citizens and business is always highly motivated to minimise them. That would work well, but in the conservative mind set taxes are evil and markets are great: and so we have to create another bloody market.

The symbolic explanations are highly unrealistic but that is what most people remember from their economics courses. So we get our politicians and journalists rabbiting on about market dynamics and all the easy stuff in chapter one of Ec 101, “Supply and Demand”, but ignoring the difficult stuff from chapter 2: “Reasons for market failure”.

You are spot on about American voters, but it is really very sad to see good honest, patriotic, hard working people being so deceived by the conservative spin merchants. The USA is spiralling down the gutter industrially, agriculturally, and socially because of the conservative’s who have been convinced by their fiscally conservative representatives that they have to suffer for the national good.

We all have to learn to see beyond the symbols to the reality of greed, corruption, envy and other factors that are ruining our lives.