The unfortunate reality for economics is that it's immensely powerful and a decent statistical tool for modeling human behavior. The biggest downside is the fact that psychopathic capitalistic interests are so invested in using it to prop up the hierarchy that they fund people to make sure it is only interpreted in a certain way. They push bullshit models and interpretations that undermines the credibility and usefulness of the science to actually improve everyone's lives. Just like how evolution was used to justify racism, economics and market forces are used to justify deregulation and the destruction of democracy on all levels.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 year ago

They've also significantly muddied the waters on what economics actually means and does. The stock market is not the economy, and being better at predicting what it does than someone else has absolutely no bearing on your ability to speak to broader economic concepts like unemployment, inflation, wage disparity, etc.

It doesn't help that in the business schools I've seen, if they require economics courses at all, only require very basic microeconomics lessons-- conceptual models of very basic principles that, when overgeneralized, can be disastrously wrong. As an example, most introductory economics classes cover supply and demand curves. These are basic and reassuring graphs that I have seen used to argue against minimum wages, under the idea that an artificially high hourly price for labor would reduce the amount of jobs available so much that it would offset gains that employees would make with the higher wage. This clashes with the empirical data we have showing that areas with high minimum wages routinely outperform those with lower minimum wages in job growth. Economics, as a study, is about developing the models and the mindset needed to think critically about the economy. There simply isn't the buy-in needed to teach that for most students who aren't explicitly there to learn about economics, so we get a million bad supply-and-demand takes every time something comes up. At the same time, there's a cultural understanding that successful businesspeople are inherently good at understanding economics, when at best they are specialists in an extremely narrow subset of the market that they work in.