Economists are Terrible People
by JS
In an otherwise interesting but ill-thought-out comparison of cuckoldry and rape, I found this little nugget:
Really? That hasn’t been my experience. And anyway, even by the flimsy standards of economics this particular claim is entirely unsupported.
This serves to reinforce my outsider view of the discipline: you folks spend all your time trying to formulate counterintuitive claims that you can support with limited data and faulty statistics. In the process you routinely boil morality, ethics, and the human condition down to single estimates of utility in conveniently succinct but laughably unsupportable ways. Then, model in hand, you commit the cardinal sin of economics: you confuse your model with reality.
Jeebus. Doesn’t the other 90% of your intellect tell you that your conclusions are totally ridiculous? When I get to such a perverse place in my own thinking I usually ask myself where I went wrong instead of tumbling forward like some goddamn moron.
UPDATE: Because economists might read this let me be a bit more explicit for the slow folks in the room. I often write so as to simulate precisely what I’m writing about, so my universal statement “economists are terrible people” is intended to evoke the precisely kind of distaste that the quoted comment above would. It’s a subtle point that individuals with decent reading skills (who must not be economists [I did it again!]) would understand.
Comments
When you say “this particular claim is entirely unsupported.” you leave out the link the author posted to a post on how men complain less; that is, the supporting evidence. If you have a problem with the evidential post, that’s separate from saying that the claim is “entirely unsupported.”
So women wail and gnash their teeth?
Magfrump, by supporting evidence, do you mean the following quote from the linked post? I quote: “We often see a women complaining about a men, to that man or to other women. We less often see the gender-reversed scenario. At least that is what I see, in friends, family, movies, and music.” I’m sure we all know that the plural of anecdote is not data.
Hmmm.. Hanson comes from the physical sciences (and is, not completely coincidentally, probably autistic), and is almost completely unknown in the discipline at large.
See the very end of that post for a link to supporting evidence.