I'm forcing myself to work through a course on #economics.
It's painful. But I'm doing it to better understand their terminology and how they think.
It's very painful. Establishment* economics is a cynical ideology, not a science, not even an art.
( * non-establishment economics exists eg zero-growth economics)
Example 1 - the senior academic economist who wrote the course says there is a debate about climate change caused by industry. That there is a "probability" it is real. And insurance is the best way to deal with its impacts, if any.
Example 2 - they think of poor people as being trapped if they get a welfare safety net. So take it away. Make sure there are "incentives" (threats) to work. This is ao simplistic that it isn't serious - it can only be a prejudice dressed up in academic framing.
Example 3 - individual selfish behavior is at the very core of progress. So who's going through build roads, water pipes, schools? The ideology totally negates the idea that humans might want to do something because it is good or beautiful or nerdy. A huge amount of scientific discoveries happened like this, not for profit seeking.
Example 4 - they frame the public sector as a tax on the rest of us. Wtf? Who invested in the research that made possible his smartphone? The public sector.
Example 5 - everything has a price. Bad behavior is to be priced up rather than disallowed by regulation. He cites not just pollution but also anti-society behavior like playing loud music in a block of flats after midnight - rather than ban it, he says it should be priced to discourage it, and some of the revenue to go to victims.
And of course, it means poor people can't buy this privilege.
This course almost predicts the wealth entitled lawlessness that we now see in the US oligarchy.
@rzeta0 You may want to look up what economists call externalised costs.
@rzeta0 I noped out of economics pretty hard after one course to meet a gen-ed requirement for my undergraduate degree. I felt there wasn't enough discussion of underlying assumptions, just sort of a nihilistic "this is the way things are" type of approach.
Anyway here's my totally unsolicited and uncompensated contribution, which is likely to be underappreciated for some time to come:
https://github.com/constructive-symmetry/constructive-symmetry/
I hope you introduce any young ones in your life to the Stern-Brocot Tree, the Symmetry Group of the Square, Pascal's Triangle, and computer programming...
thanks - I will take a look tonight, I appreciate you sharing your thoughts,