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How economics is like 1950s Freudian psychology (washingtonpost.com)

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[–]pickering1 1ポイント2ポイント  (0子コメント)

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Not saying Noah's article was great but this piece is also unfounded fluff.

[–]laboringjoe 1ポイント2ポイント  (0子コメント)

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Gelman has a weird stick up his butt over economics and for whatever reason, over how economists don't graph their regressions like how statisticians were taught to. I don't think he's making a strong case on Gary Becker. He went off over a small quote and took it more seriously than it should be. I don't know how much of Becker's work he actually read since then but I'm not convinced he read much.

And it's not like every economist is held in high esteem because they were absolutely correct. Becker, like Fogel and Keynes, started a new branch of economics. That's noteworthy in and of itself.

I agree with Noah that their pay is higher because they have better outside options which is also why I think financial economists are paid better than other economists. Like half of Columbia's Finance PhDs go into industry, not academia. And they've proven their ability to be useful to the private and public sectors and I'd say that's because of the variety of subfields economists study coupled with the strength of their analytical tools (econometrics and theoretical models). For all the belly-aching of economic theory being too simple to be useful, tell that to Hal Varian and Google.

[–]statist_warmist 0ポイント1ポイント  (0子コメント)

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As someone with degrees in both psychology and economics, I've always thought that economics as it is commonly thought, i.e. neoclassical or monetarist has far more in common with Skinnerian Behaviourism than Freudian psychology. The common elements are that humans are essentially calculating automatons, always using past experience to determine the behaviour that will result in utility/please/pain avoidance.

In psychology (and indeed linguistics, where Skinnerian concepts were important for a while), we had the rise of cognitivist theories and, in a linguistic sense, Chomsky (no matter what you think of his politics, his theories of crucial windows of development makes him a towering figure in linguistic theory) that consigned operant conditioning to a corner of behavioural science.

Operant conditioning is really important, and has huge implications for how we behave, particularly in regard to, say, gambling machines or product choices. It does not, however, give much insight into more complex behaviour, or a theory of mind.

If, however, Skinnerian theory promoted the interests of the very rich, like Friedmanist monetarism, it would be better rewarded, and would likely be the dominant strand of psychology today. Even though neoclassical theory is sorely lacking in its explanatory or predictive power IMHO, it is still favoured in part I think, because anything that supports billionaires will always find a political voice.