Home > The Economics Profession > Are economists superior to other social scientists?

Are economists superior to other social scientists?

April 29, 2015 Leave a comment Go to comments

from Grazia Ietto-Gillies

En route from London to Rome I read The Superiority of Economists by Marion Fourcade, Etienne Ollion and Yann Algan (Journal of Economic Perspectives, 29, 1: 89-114). https://www.aeaweb.org/articles.php?doi=10.1257/jep.29.1.89

Some travels within Italy – to Pisa and Siena – gave me time for musings and reflections about the content of this paper. Move forward a few weeks and back in London I have decided to turn those reflections into clicks and share them . . .  read more

  1. Ack Nice
    April 29, 2015 at 7:41 pm
    Reply

    Humanity could do itself no greater good than outlawing the economics profession as being too dangerous, stupid, and cruel to tolerate one minute longer. What use has Humanity for a ridiculously pseudoscientific pursuit the entire purpose and function of which is to cause people to come into relations of superiority and inferiority with each other? None. None whatsoever – unless Humanity has some use for unspeakable miseries everescalating unto autogenocide.

    Economics is the pseudoscientific, genosadistic, antirational pursuit of innumerable ways and means to force human beings into anti-natural relations of superiority and inferiority with one another, and this is the cause of the whole evil – – the evil that now, in our absolutely unique age of highspeed communication and transportation, computers, and the atomic genie let out of the lamp …now means history on repeat on steroids kaboom for the humans and their only habitable planet. All economists have ever done and will ever do is exhaust ingenuity striving to concoct attempted excuses for this or that system designed to force some human beings to be subject to the arbitrary will of others. The economists’ work is the work of causing victims of thieves to be subject to the arbitrary will of the robber – in perpetuity.

    Economists worship at the altar of manufacturing and enforcing superiority-inferiority – – when equality is the only moral relationship between human beings.

    Were y’all raised by Mothers who gave you plates heaped with delicious foods while your siblings were served one dessicated pea at the same table?? I doubt that – so what explains your immovable devotion to the diabolically self-and-other-harming idea to make sure we’re all forced into relations of superiority and inferiority to each other, eh?? Does somebody go around to university econ departments and business schools casting a darkmagic spell over your wits?? Do they rewire you back to front in school so you’ll always have your recognition of tyranny and liberty opposite the truth? Are you taught to despise life itself? Did you spend your childhoods trying to persuade your parents to love you more give you more than your brother because you are superior to Tommy? Do you just get off on subjecting working families to the arbitrary will of the leisureclass wealthpower giants? Does that turn you on, get your juices running hot? Is it seriously a sexual desire to see people dominating unwilling others sans limits? Are you truly all perverted in some way you might even be blind to? Cecil Rhodes gives you a stiffy, does he? Henry Kissinger and Larry Summers types fire up some primal lust for power over others in economists, do they?

    Bah. A pox on all your houses!

    The article is profoundly funny. Irony on steroids. A cosmic joke of zenith magnitude. Thanks for the biggest laugh of my life. Y’all are just so…just so…just so PRECIOUS! With you economic wizards at the helm, nobody will ever see the obvious for what it is – that having power over others very effectively murders the morals of the master and very thoroughly degrades the subject – until what we’re left with is the colossal destruction of peace, freedom, safety, prosperity, satisfaction, democratic values, security, ease, fraternity, liberty, happiness – love – and our chance to have a future at all, let alone a quality of life that makes life worth living.

    Get rid of the economics profession, Humanity, so we can return to our senses and row our boat back to the safe wharf of justice and to doing what is right and

    PASS THE FISH FOR CHRISTSAKE!

    WE ARE STARVING, SICK, AND DYING OUT HERE!

    • blocke
      April 29, 2015 at 11:04 pm
      Reply

      What you say is true, but it is a lament rather than an argument. From what I can tell, as an historian preoccupied with the evolution of economics as a discipline since 1900, the economists are incapable of reforming themselves. Nothing reveals this more than this blog; it has good intentions, but it has absolutely no obvious effect on the way economics is integrated into government policies and the institutions of academia. Since nobody can predict the future, we can’t even say if such monumental inability to deal with the real world of economics will end badly for the academic profession.

  2. Geoff Davies
    April 30, 2015 at 1:57 am
    Reply

    Ack –
    My sentiments precisely – Sack the Economists http://sacktheeconomists.com

  3. Macrocompassion
    April 30, 2015 at 1:00 pm
    Reply

    I would like for them to be superior, but unfortunately the economists are not even true scientists!

    See what Nobel Laureate Richard P. Feyman had to say in his lecture and essay on “Cargo Cult Science”, where he rightly claimed that the economists are pseudo scientists, like those Pacific Islanders who missed the benefits of the American Air Forces on their landing strip after WW2. So these islanders re-constructed all the things that the USAF took away, but made then out of straw and reeds. Control tower and controller with headphones all from straw. Yet the ‘planes did not come!

    So why should our countries national progress be able to respond with all these economics reed-men and their straw filled ideas about what to do?

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