Some genius takes:

The whole Global North/South split is a pet peeve of mine as a social scientist working in development policy. It’s a bunch of outdated garbage from the Cold War that was really just a thinly veiled dogwhistle for ‘white/the good Asians’ and ‘not white’. It doesn’t hold up to any rational examination. South Africa was part of the Global North until white rule under Apartheid ended, and now they’re in the Global South. southern nations.

Real educated economist chimes in:

Jason Hickel is an anthropologist (read: not economist) and degrowther. Despite having no background and seemingly almost no understanding of economics as a field, he somehow continues to get ‘economics’ papers published in reputable journals despite their obvious low quality. But to anyone with a cursory understanding of economics, it should be entirely unsurprising that exports from developing nations to developed are more labor intensive than vice-versa. This is not a novel conclusion and is not ‘appropriation’, but is entirely explained by a concept in economics called comparative advantage.

Another genius owns the article epic style

This paper is a demonstration of why input-output (IO) models are bad for economic research. IO models were used by the soviet central planners to allocate resources. IO models are bad for research for the same reason the are bad for planning. The authors look at “embodied labor” (adjusted for human capital), the idea being that any two things produced by an hour of (human capital adjusted) labor must have the same value (btw, this “labor theory of value” goes back to Adam Smith, and was later promulgated by Marx).

Other facts that the authors’ framework will struggle to explain: why is it that the poor countries that most integrated with global trade networks became rich (s korea, Japan, Singapore) or are otherwise growing quickly (china, Panama, Vietnam)? Why is it that countries with severe barriers to trade with the global north struggle to grow (n Korea, India for second half of 20th century)? That’s very hard to explain if trade with the global north is fundamentally exploitative.

  • BeamBrain [he/him]@hexbear.netEnglish
    44·
    3 months ago

    why “Economics as as field” is a religion with at best a tenuous relation to any actually existing economy.

    Would you be willing to make an effortpost on this? I always love reading about this sort of thing.

    • ProfessorOwl_PhD [any]@hexbear.netEnglish
      22·
      3 months ago

      I’m not gonna effortpost about it but look into econophysics. It’s mostly just sticking economic models through physics equations (eg. Treating money as a liquid and making predictions based on hydrodynamics), but it makes more accurate predictions than classical economics.
      It’s a very small field, but apparently it’s infested with Marxists.

      • TreadOnMe [none/use name]@hexbear.netEnglish
        4·
        3 months ago

        That makes far more sense because of the statistical methods used to derive hydrodynamics equations. Liquid behaviors aren’t assumed equations, they are demonstrated through rigorous testing that people then use mathematical models to create ‘best fit’ lines for ease of future use. Not that it perfectly predicts the behavior of the liquid, just that it predicts it well enough for practice. Even just having a standardized viewpoint.on money would be an absolute revolution in modern economic theory, so I am all for it.

    • 7bicycles [he/him]@hexbear.netEnglish
      18·
      3 months ago

      For a real shorthand experience of “what the fuck” I suggest looking up how economists use ceteris paribus. It’s a tool that has it’s place in certain disciplines, but I’ll point you towards deep leftist maoist website, investopedia, and their key takeaways

      Ceteris paribus is a Latin phrase that generally means “all other things being equal.”

      In economics, it acts as a shorthand indication of the effect one economic variable has on another, provided all other variables remain the same.

      Many economists rely on ceteris paribus to describe relative tendencies in markets and to build and test economic models.

      The difficulty with ceteris paribus is the challenge of holding all other variables constant in an effort to isolate what is driving change.+

      In reality, one can never assume “all other things being equal.”

      Takes 'em all of 5 bullet points to get to “this has a tenous relationship to reality at best” and basically admit that all the models aren’t actually based in reality. At which point at best you have invented a philosophical school, realistically, it’s a religion