There’s a lot going on here, but this person’s take on economics seems bad, and also is a reductive take that is very common.
To calibrate, this take is actually incredibly similar how someone critiquing EA would say “all EA is obsessed with esoteric philosophical arguments and captured by AI and the billionaire donors”[1].
Reasons:
A decent chunk of economics is concerned with meta-economics and disliking economics. These ideas are held by many of the key figures.
In addition to these negative meta views, which are common, entire subdisciplines or alt schools are concerned with worldview changes in economics
See behavioral economics (which is well, sort of not super promising because it seems to be a repacking of anecdotes/psychology)
See heterodox economics (which also does poorly basically for similar reasons as above, as well as challenges with QA/QC/talent supply, because diluting disciplines wholesale doesn’t really work)
As a plus, economics has resisted the extremes of the culture wars and kept its eye on the work, while internally, to most students and some faculty, IMO proportionately giving disadvantaged people some equity or leg up (obviously not complete).
The effort/practice given to diversity is pretty similar to the level EA orgs have chosen and I suspect that’s not a coincidence.
Economics has avoided the replication crisis, the event which drives a lot of negative opinion about mainstream science in EA
To me, it’s obvious economics would...it’s very hard to communicate why, e.g. to show EAs the environment in an empirical seminar (argument in labor economics between senior faculty)
The amount of respect senior/mainstream economics give to reality and talking to people on the ground in empirical matters is large, and many ideas about unobserved/quality/social models has come out of this (although these ideas themselves can be attacked as repackaging the obvious)
Some work in economics like environmental economics (not the same as “Ecological economics” , which is one of the unpromising heterodox schools) and practical work like kidney donation (Al Roth) are highly cherished by almost all economists
Health economics and developmental economics is basically the entire cornerstone of the most concrete/publicized sector of EA, that is, global health, e.g. GiveWell.
GiveDirectly was literally founded and driven by economists, the entire methodology/worldview is an economics one.
The issues with economics are similar/literally isomorphic/and in one case identical with EA (the math, dissenting subcultures and decision theory). I always wanted to write up but it seemed ancillary, hard to do well (for the social reality reasons) and embarrassing in multiple ways.
I don’t usually add this, but writing this, because this person seems to be setting themselves up for a bit of a public figure role in EA, and mentions credentials a bit:
Some of the content in previous comments and this comment isn’t a great update in regards to those goals above and I would tap the brakes here. In this comment, it’s not the general take in the content itself (negative takes on economics are fine and good ones are informative) but the intellectual depth/probably quality of the context of these specific ideas (“Rational Man hypothesis, rapid convergence on Nash equilibrium play in complex games, importance of positional goods in advanced market economies, continuity in rates of economic growth”) patterns matches not great.
Hi Charles, you seem to be putting a lot of weight on a short, quick note that I made as a comment on a comment on an EA Forum post, based on my personal experiences in an Econ department (I wasn’t ‘mentioning credentials’, I was offering observations based on experience).
(You also included some fairly vague criticisms of my previous posts and comments that could be construed as rather ad hominem.)
You are correct that there are many subfields within Econ, some of which challenge standard models, and that Econ has some virtues that other social sciences often don’t have. Fair enough.
The question remains: why is Econ largely ignoring the likely future impact of AI on the economy (apart from some specific issues such as automation and technological unemployment), and treating most of the economy as likely to carry on more or less as it is today?
Matt and I offered some suggestions based on what we see as a few intellectual biases and blind spots in Econ. Do you have any other suggestions?
There’s a lot going on here, but this person’s take on economics seems bad, and also is a reductive take that is very common.
To calibrate, this take is actually incredibly similar how someone critiquing EA would say “all EA is obsessed with esoteric philosophical arguments and captured by AI and the billionaire donors”[1].
Reasons:
A decent chunk of economics is concerned with meta-economics and disliking economics. These ideas are held by many of the key figures.
In addition to these negative meta views, which are common, entire subdisciplines or alt schools are concerned with worldview changes in economics
See behavioral economics (which is well, sort of not super promising because it seems to be a repacking of anecdotes/psychology)
See heterodox economics (which also does poorly basically for similar reasons as above, as well as challenges with QA/QC/talent supply, because diluting disciplines wholesale doesn’t really work)
As a plus, economics has resisted the extremes of the culture wars and kept its eye on the work, while internally, to most students and some faculty, IMO proportionately giving disadvantaged people some equity or leg up (obviously not complete).
The effort/practice given to diversity is pretty similar to the level EA orgs have chosen and I suspect that’s not a coincidence.
Economics has avoided the replication crisis, the event which drives a lot of negative opinion about mainstream science in EA
To me, it’s obvious economics would...it’s very hard to communicate why, e.g. to show EAs the environment in an empirical seminar (argument in labor economics between senior faculty)
The amount of respect senior/mainstream economics give to reality and talking to people on the ground in empirical matters is large, and many ideas about unobserved/quality/social models has come out of this (although these ideas themselves can be attacked as repackaging the obvious)
Some work in economics like environmental economics (not the same as “Ecological economics” , which is one of the unpromising heterodox schools) and practical work like kidney donation (Al Roth) are highly cherished by almost all economists
Health economics and developmental economics is basically the entire cornerstone of the most concrete/publicized sector of EA, that is, global health, e.g. GiveWell.
GiveDirectly was literally founded and driven by economists, the entire methodology/worldview is an economics one.
https://www.givedirectly.org/research-at-give-directly/
There’s (a lot) more but I have to do some work and I got tired of writing
The issues with economics are similar/literally isomorphic/and in one case identical with EA (the math, dissenting subcultures and decision theory). I always wanted to write up but it seemed ancillary, hard to do well (for the social reality reasons) and embarrassing in multiple ways.
I don’t usually add this, but writing this, because this person seems to be setting themselves up for a bit of a public figure role in EA, and mentions credentials a bit:
Some of the content in previous comments and this comment isn’t a great update in regards to those goals above and I would tap the brakes here. In this comment, it’s not the general take in the content itself (negative takes on economics are fine and good ones are informative) but the intellectual depth/probably quality of the context of these specific ideas (“Rational Man hypothesis, rapid convergence on Nash equilibrium play in complex games, importance of positional goods in advanced market economies, continuity in rates of economic growth”) patterns matches not great.
Hi Charles, you seem to be putting a lot of weight on a short, quick note that I made as a comment on a comment on an EA Forum post, based on my personal experiences in an Econ department (I wasn’t ‘mentioning credentials’, I was offering observations based on experience).
(You also included some fairly vague criticisms of my previous posts and comments that could be construed as rather ad hominem.)
You are correct that there are many subfields within Econ, some of which challenge standard models, and that Econ has some virtues that other social sciences often don’t have. Fair enough.
The question remains: why is Econ largely ignoring the likely future impact of AI on the economy (apart from some specific issues such as automation and technological unemployment), and treating most of the economy as likely to carry on more or less as it is today?
Matt and I offered some suggestions based on what we see as a few intellectual biases and blind spots in Econ. Do you have any other suggestions?