The Tragic Science

[NNadir]

Nature, among the world's most cited scientific journals (often credited with the highest "Impact Factor" among such journals) features, in every issue a "Top Five Science Books" section.

Here's the link to the current issue's list: Greta Thunberg on climate solutions, and more: Books in brief

Subtitle:

Andrew Robinson reviews five of the best science picks.

Here's a book on the list that definitely caught my eye:

The Tragic Science
George F. DeMartino Univ. Chicago Press (2022)

With its reductive view of human nature, economics was called “the dismal science” in the nineteenth century. Economist George DeMartino prefers “tragic science”, because so many adherents have been willing to ignore harm in pursuit of growth. “Their calling validated the imposition of whatever harms were necessary … to get the job done,” he concludes. Such hubris has been tempered by global financial disasters and climate change, but the profession still requires major reform, he trenchantly argues.

Nature 612, 210 (2022)

Here is the publisher's blurb, a little more detailed: The Tragic Science

A relevant excerpt from it:

In The Tragic Science, George F. DeMartino says what economists have too long repressed: that economists do great harm even as they aspire to do good. Economist-induced harm, DeMartino shows, results in part from economists’ “irreparable ignorance”—from the fact that they know far less than they tend to believe they know—and from disciplinary training that treats the human tolls of economic policies and interventions as simply the costs of promoting social betterment. DeMartino details the complicated nature of economic harm, explores economists’ frequent failure to recognize it, and makes a sobering case for professional humility and for genuine respect for those who stand to be harmed by economists’ practice.

We hear from all sorts of fools, here and elsewhere that economics (usually short term - it's appalling how few people have a shred of concern for future generations) is the most important thing there is. This often comes up, ironically, over in DU's E&E forum, where short lived consumer junk is hyped as being cheap, even though most of it is an affectation for rich people that's manufactured by poor people at the expense of their health and well being.

This of course, is the attitude of my one time "peace and love" generation, now mostly the war and consume generation, the baby boomers.

I am trying not to buy more books; we have run out of space in our home to put more of them, but my public library doesn't seem to have it. I may do that awful consumer thing to "stimulate the economy" and either buy it or ask for it for Christmas.

How can I possibly be a baby boomer if I can't be a hypocrite?

I trust you're having a great weekend.

[4dog]

1. They keep calling it a science.

Wishful thinking. Lots of data, no good cause and effect. A lever of power.

[NNadir]

2. I fully credit your remark.

The locution in this respect is suspect.

[Wounded Bear]

4. I think of it as a "soft" science...

much like the social sciences where there is perhaps a lot of data, but not necessarily a lot of solid cause and effect proofs.

When people and behaviors get involved, predictability suffers.

[Warpy]

6. I consider it a subset of sociology

Just because there are a lot of numbers attached doesn't make it particularly able to be replicated in a lab.

I offer the cautionary tale of Long Term Capital Management, headed up by Nobel winning economists who devised a mathematical formula for playing the markets in such a way that losing became impossible. Until they did. It's quite a story.

[c-rational]

3. I read an article in the New Yorker on the economist Frank Ramsey, 1904-1930. He believed

that 'the well being of future generations should be given the same weight as the present one'. He died too young.

[NNadir]

5. In an ethical world the idea wouldn't be radical. In this one it is. n/t.