That's because economics is ideological.
Yes and No. No and Yes.
Certain insights of economics are ripped out of context, qualifying phrases stricken, and deployed by media whores (MW) in the service of the paymasters.
Free Trade in the long run will benefit more people than tariff walls. (See Great Depression, History of; Smoot & Hartley Act, Consequences of.) Free Trade in the short run will cause economic dislocation as firms and workers are out competed. Both of these are true and neither affects & effects can be ignored. Och nu den svenska kocken bakar en Alaskan älg jägare. Bonk! Bonk! Bonk!
Economics reduces to simple concepts like Free Trade, Inflation and Unemployment which are colouring book caricatures of the economic forces that really shape people's lives.
If I grow bananas in South America, the concept of free trade vs protectionism is irrelevant when I can't get a fair price for my product because the supposedly level playing field is skewed - sometimes by force - to give the big corporates all of the leverage.
Anomalies like this mean that economics is wrong in so many ways that if you stripped it down to essentials and left the elements that have some connection with reality - meaning everyday reality, not the reality of the super-rich - there would be very little left.
Worst of all is the way that economics promotes an implicit moral code of mindless speculation and accumulation. Shared prosperity isn't a bad thing, but whatever the PR says, the real goal of economics today seems to be personal wealth accumulated with total disdain for the greater good, and the limited selection of social metrics that are used in economics - inflation, unemployment and GDP - are so crude that they exclude all social responsibility.
It's surely possible to create economic metrics that live in the real world, and not in some superficial 19th century abstraction of it. But for now these fake abstractions are treated as if they're the most important thing on the planet - which is literally an insane state of affairs.
When someone talks about 'economic realities' supporting a reform agenda, are they doing economics, or polemic?
Do the Economist and the FT do economics, or polemic?
The underlying problem is that the concepts and measures used in economics lend themselves everso elegantly to one kind of political discourse, while making alternative views and metrics difficult to conceptualise, quantify and discuss.
Free Trade in the long run will benefit more people than tariff walls.
Not necessarily. That's the whole point of this debate. And since there's no such thing as free trade we don't actually know anything much about what it will do, only what it might.
Temporal Logic, a branch of Modal Logic, exists to abstract the impossible, the possible, the necessary. Such that:
P{x,y}
where y achieves, gains, or has the P referent through Time via x and P is a quality or a quantity - All XOR Some XOR None. If we get lucky, the quantity maybe first order - 'a' number assigned to 'a' variable, tho' it's much more likely to be a second or greater order quantity, such as a Complex Number, or a series of mathematical statements grouped into inter-related families of mathematical statements.
One result of this, using the Lowenheim-Skolem Theorem, is the (potential and unpredictable) bifurcation of model functions from D -> T to D -> T' where T' is who-the-hell-knows-what. ;-) One known occurance of this is the transformation, in Catastrophe Theory, of control to state or state to control variable(s). Time, then, can become a control variable in certain of these transformations.
Modeling (certain) Feedback Loops, therefore, we have to acknowledge the potential for Time to 'jump' between playing a role as a control or as a state variable leading to qualitative change of of the Fitness Landscape.
Note: I am not saying Time isn't constant. That would be ... weird. Och nu den svenska kocken bakar en Alaskan älg jägare. Bonk! Bonk! Bonk!
I hate temporal logic. Nasty icky stuff.
It's just another dimension. What are we up to now? 18 +/-?
I know I owe the diary and I plan on finishing it Real Soon Now. Any day.
yup, yup, yup.
Of course if I tell you, you'll tell Migeru, he'll tell Sven, and pretty soon today will be tomorrow and yesterday will have had been next month. 8^p Och nu den svenska kocken bakar en Alaskan älg jägare. Bonk! Bonk! Bonk!
(laughing) Och nu den svenska kocken bakar en Alaskan älg jägare. Bonk! Bonk! Bonk!
