Flippanarchy

Economics is closer to theology than physics as an intellectual discipline. Its power is proportional to the belief it commands.

Person with degree in Econ here:

Ah, yep. This is correct.

Our theologies tend to have more numbers than most religions, but most economic 'schools of thought' pretty much are just warring religious sects, the dynamics are quite similar.

That being said, I am speaking of the kinds of 'economics' the vast majority of people will ever hear about, due to how at least in the US, we mostly only popularize and give media time to what Academic Economists largely consider to be idiot crank fraud propogandists.

There are some actually good modern Academic Economists who you'll hear from or about, from time to time, and they often are highly respected and credible because they have the capacity to consider the varying ideological/religious flavors of economic sects, and pick the parts of each of them that seem to actually be well evidenced, and make functional/causal sense, without discontinuity or contradiction.

Like uh, I myself can tell you that I find a lot of Marxist economics to be compelling and accurate, but, some of its proposed exact ideas on how prices and pricing work... are problematic.

Conversely, while I find the vast majority of Austrian economics to be voodoo bullshit, I do think they have at least a core framework of how to approach some dynamics in monetary policies that actually do track with reality better than most other economic 'schools', such as MMT.

What I mean is that they tend to pay way, way more attention to the different uh, levels, or kinds of money, and how they circulate around and interact with things like bond markets and interest rates, and from this you can get a more holistic picture of the actual state and behavior of monetary and financial systems... whereas a lot of other economists just hsnd wave away that complexity, and then come up with more ad hoc explanations for things that a sort of Austrian-derived monetary view can give you some useful predictive indicators from.

And, just to clarify, I am not an academic myself, just got to a specialization in econometrics and then went to work as a data analyst / 'scientist'.

(I always found the job description of 'data scientisr' to be largely a misnomer, we're basically just a flavor of statisticians? but sure, we are a scientist because boomers think knowing how to do stats on a computer is 'science'? like we are... discovering new truths about the world????)

I'd say if you want a crash course in some non bullshit modern economics, check out uh, Richard Wolfe, Joseph Stiglitz, Yannis Varoufakis, Robert Reich.

Also, check out Paul Samuelson, who in his time did actuslly strongly push for using more robust and complex math (for economists, anyway) by borrowing from physics.

Oh right and we cannot forget the Beautiful Mind himself, John Nash, who also did a lot of serious, basically genius level math, and more or less made Game Theory into a massively useful and applicable framework for evaluating how and why agents make which choices in basically any definable scenario.

Really, he is a mathematician, not primarily an economist, but I at least find Game Theory to be a fundamentally necesarry tool in any serious economist's toolkit, and Nash did win an Economics Nobel.