Economists versus the Economy

The disagreement isn't practical (over what broad effect given policy will have), it's ideological (over what broad outcome is desirable).

That the ideology is often sslf-serving (if arguably only in fairly myopic perspective) for lawmakers who are also part of the economic elite doesn't make it any less ideological, it just explains the attraction of the ideology to those actors.

So in that context, writing a report "at the behest of Iceland's Chamber of Commerce" is pretty small potatoes. It's far more likely that they commissioned a report knowing Hubbard's own views in advance, which makes it dodgy as hell, but not quite corruption. And in any case, many of those arguments about market reforms and deregulation really ought to be assessed on merits (which are objectively poor), with who's paying for them being more of a side note. It's also arguable that a professional body would not solve these kinds of problems. It'd be hard to build an argument against a profession by focussing on just one hack.

Re (1): taking an economics model and pushing it to production involves a genuinely considerable amount of work. "Make more privately" would mean something along the lines of getting hired by a hedge fund as consultant. There are also other incentives involved: first, academia generally urges people to publish. Second, having a model be published is part of the way it is accepted by practitioners too: if you just come up with a random model, it would have to be insanely good to convince anyone to put their money behind it, otherwise they'll require you to get other people to assess it, and you'll have to publish it in a peer-reviewed journal. The exception would be really specialized models, where you think you found an arbitrage opportunity or something (even then it's not completely clear, see, e.g., the literature on selling deep out-of-money puts).

We speak about a single psychology study's findings with the many of the same words of concrete certainty that we do with the deepest mathematical theorems because that is what is most natural. We say something is true when we really mean that we're pretty sure something is true under certain conditions. We assume that everyone understands the touch of chaos underneath the words based on the context. But they don't. And we don't either. We know better but we fool ourselves more or less by accident and repetition and it shakes us when contradictions inevitably arise from messy reality.

And on the other end of the spectrum, if any uncertainty at all is spoken of it seems to cast the whole statement into doubt.

The language of statistics and uncertainty is cumbersome and unnatural. If I could wish for anything and have it come true for the sake of advancement of humanity it would be for a standard modifier or tense for levels of uncertainty. I would trade that increase in complication for the reduction of confusion.

Economy means "the laws of the habitat", and ecology means "the story of the habitat".

How can 'smart people' think they are separable?

Imagine trying to do physics or chemistry, except that everything had to translate into the units of $.

Why is it: my sister is a full time mom on her own dime, whereas a friend of mine gets paid $14/hr to nanny? (Her clients pay $50/hr and she gets a fraction of that).

Care for one child, get paid, whereas if you care for another child, you have to pay? My sister could go work as a nanny and get paid to care for someone elses' children, but when it comes to taking care of her own, she's running a loss? To keep up, she goes and cleans those very same peoples' houses.

That's a bunch of nonsense, that two children would have different economic values. That one family would have to scramble just to keep up while another family's cup runneth over. The very real work my sister does to care for my niece is all but invisible in the economist's spreadsheet, while my nanny friend is considered a working, productive person.

These days I've been taking care of my niece quite often, and my work is not counted on the spreadsheets of the economists either. That doesn't make it any less valuable ecologically, spiritually, socially, communally... But economically, my work is in the red.

The contradictions are endless. People work "for free" all the time, and it doesn't get counted. In fact, such work is often "discounted" as amateur, poverty, laziness.

What's much more important, to many economists, and what is counted, is to sit at some desk somewhere doing busywork in an office so that you can pump economic power into the pockets of rent suckers. That is counted on the economists' sheets. That'll get you greasy green paper pieces. So I could be doing that and walking around with all the clout telling people about my career and buying people drinks at the bar, and people would pat me on the back, and my family would be so proud of me, and my friends would envy my bank account, etc. But I wouldn't get to spend time with my niece.

Until people stop putting up with the madness of mainstream economic religion, it's just going to continue.

People take monstrous loans that grow and grow, just to have a stable home. That's the norm. What good does it do anyone? All it really does is uproot communities on a yearly basis.

I'm not saying there's anything wrong with being nomadic. But when multiple generations are in exile because of rampant greed all across the board (homeowners are corroborating by taking those loans out in the first place, by paying such high prices at the cost of such high debts)... it's a problem.

How much time and human energy is wasted by "breadwinners" doing ritual busywork at offices 40-70 hours a week? They could be at home doing things that are actually useful for at least half of that time. Being with kids, cooking, gardening, reading/studying, exercising, cleaning, fixing stuff...

What counts as "busywork" vs. real productive work is ideologically relative... and here is where we desperately need spiritual evolution.

It's not a scholarly work, but references a great deal of scholarly work.

It's fascinating to read and imagine how the profession has not been reformed in light of these known flaws (and the fact of the huge failure of mainstream Economics to predict the Great Recession).

There is some hope though in some student movements that are starting to challenge how economics is taught (like Rethinking Economics and the Post-crash Economics Society). It may be that like some times in science, the profession will advance "one funeral at a time" as the new generation comes in.