The reality is that when you compare the purchasing power of money in different places and times, the differences in a myriad of relevant factors are often so great that it makes no sense at all to express them with a single number
That is too sweeping a criticism. We have to model the world somehow when making decisions, and quantitatively. That goes for policy makers also.
Are you familiar with Jared Diamond's lay account and defense of operationalization, here? I'd be interested to hear what parts of it you object to.
That is too sweeping a criticism. We have to model the world somehow when making decisions, and quantitatively. That goes for policy makers also.
With all due respect, this is exactly the sort of stonewalling, discourse-killing response I commonly see from economists. If you can't justify your model, then the correct and honest thing to do is to admit that you don't have a model and try to deal as best you can with your ignorance -- not to continue using models divorced from reality with the excuse that you don't have anything better. An astrologer can u...
A Wall Street Journal article by Harvard professor of government Harvey Mansfield claims that the social sciences and humanities are inferior to the sciences. The article implicitly urges undergraduates to major in science. From the article:
Do you agree with this? As a game theorist I probably have a rather biased view of the situation. It's certainly true that the ideal of the scientific method is vastly better than the practice of economists, but I think that majoring in economics provides better training for a rationalist than majoring in any of the sciences does.
Economics explicitly considers what it means to be rational. Although it infrequently considers ways in which humans are irrational, I'm under the impression that the hard sciences never do this. Furthermore, because economists can almost never perform replicable experiments we have to rely on what everyone in the profession recognizes as messy data; therefore we’re far more equipped than hard scientists to understand the limits of using statistical inference to draw conclusions from real world situations. Although I have seen no data on this, I bet that a claim by nutritionists that they have found a strong causal link between some X and heart disease would be treated with far more skepticism by the average economist than the average hard scientist.