That is not the title of Simon Jenkin’s article in the Guardian today, but it could be. My favourite bit is this:
I was always uncomfortable at the overselling of economics as a science, when it is rather a branch of psychology, a study of the peculiarities of human nature. Its spurious objectivity, manifest in its ridiculous love affair with maths, induced a “Jupiter complex”, a conviction that scientific certainty, applied with enough rigour to any problem, triumphs over all.
So true. But I’ve known that since I was a first-year undergraduate economist.
Jenkins is right when he says:
Economic management is and always will be about politics, about the clash of needs and demands resolved through the constitutional process.
Without appreciating it he also provides the clearest argument to rebut those who put forward the idea of economic incidence and its impact on corporation tax. Firstly, what they say is spurious science. Second they ignore the normative political reality that clearly says that what they are arguing is both intensely subjective and wrong.
3 Comments
You could make the same claims about any academic discipline. It is a sterile debate that has no currency outside of the junior common room!
Alastair
Respectfully, you’re wrong.
The debate about the impact and nature of economics might well be one for the JCR, but it belongs in the SCR as well and in the wider world, and your trite dismissal is indication of either not understanding the subject or not wishing to engage with the subject but most certainly not a comprehension of the subject.
Richard
given that I have a degree in economics it is perhaps reasonable to assume I know nothing about it! BTW the debate that is sterile is whether economics is a science or not, which is where your piece started. It does not worry me that people use economic arguments to support their ideological positions. As you say those are subjective, and right only from a particular viewpoint.
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