
The trouble with writing a pop-econ book - RepAgent
https://www.reddit.com/r/badeconomics/comments/7yc8v5/the_fiat_discussion_sticky_come_shoot_the_shit/dugzwu2/
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Gatsky
This is an issue with any pop-X book, namely that complicated, messy topics
are oversimplified and packaged neatly.

As a reader, it is very enticing - you feel like you are learning very
efficiently, the reviews are filled with comments like 'I learned more from
this book than 5 years of geography/economics/history/physics/chemistry etc in
school'. People that have swallowed the pop-X book wholesale become
evangelists, telling everyone who will listen how important it is to 'Sleep
for 8.5 hours a night', or 'Stop eating bread'. But really, you are often
paying to be told a fairytale about topic X.

~~~
yaseer
I agree with your points, but I wouldn't group the importance of sleep with
diet fads.

There's an overwhelming amount of non-contradictory scientific evidence on the
importance of sleep.

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tptacek
/r/BadEconomics is a fun subreddit; it's people with at least some passing
acquaintance with formal economics writing snarky takedowns of economic claims
made elsewhere on Reddit (or the Internet at large). It's not quite as good,
content-wise, as the tier-1 subreddits like AskHistorians, but it's a solid
tier 2.

~~~
dorchadas
Most of the /r/badX subreddits are like that. Especially the ones that require
people to post _why_ something is bad, which is all of them that I'm aware of
except /r/badphilosophy, which just makes fun of the posts (and is fun in its
own peculiar way).

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coldtea
Strangely few would do the same to a pop-math or pop-physics book.

It's as if econ itself, and not the pop- simplification, is to blame...

~~~
jhbadger
Sure they would. There are plenty of "Einstein was wrong" or "The circle
really can be squared" cranks out in the general public. The main difference
is that in economics there often is a financial reason why people hold weird
ideas rather than just being crazy.

~~~
coldtea
> _There are plenty of "Einstein was wrong" or "The circle really can be
> squared" cranks out in the general public._

Yes, but those are kooks, where the consensus between physicists is specific
and solid and their predictions either pan out or not (except in wild areas of
exploration, like string theory and such).

Whereas with economics, economists don't see eye to eye (except on trivial
parts that are 99% mathematical results), and anything applied with the
intention of making a prediction is rarely better than random guesses.

Simply one discipline concerns a fixed reality, where preferences and opinions
don't matter as to the behavior of e.g. matter, energy, etc. and we try to
model it as best as we can (a fixed target).

And the other a human activity, where political biases, private interests,
personality quirks, morality, cultural norms, backroom deals, laws, outlaws,
the press, and everything in between pull in various directions, and where
even if we could get close to an accurate predictive model, there would still
be huge (trillion dollar huge) motives (political, financial, career related,
etc) to make black appear as white and vice versa.

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lordnacho
Pop-econ, as a subgenre of pop-science, is a necessary evil.

The thing about econ is it's closely connected to political philosophy, and
politics causes all sorts of partisan issues. Witness the furore over
Piketty's work over recent years.

So why do I say it's necessary and evil?

Well it's necessary because it's often the only way for someone outside of
academia to get an overview of a topic. Without these kinds of work we'd be
lost rifling through various journal papers, not knowing which ones are
considered important and which ones not.

It's evil because that editorial power is seductive. To sell books, that
author needs to make a forceful point. To do that, you can't just leave the
evidence at "inconclusive", even though that might be sensible. Why write a
book at all if it says "we don't know"? So we get selection bias in what books
are written.

A friend of mine writes pop-econ books, and from a very libertarian point of
view. Something about it seems like a just-so story. The inherent noisiness of
economic evidence is lost, all the graphs are cherry picked to support his
view. And yet you'd have to dig quite a lot to find specific things to
complain about.

I studied economics myself, and on a lot of things I thought the stack of
papers had good arguments one way and the other. My tutor, a famous Marxist,
was also quite good at giving the free market side of evidence, so it's not
like he was all one-sided.

My main concern is that people who haven't had a bit of exposure to economics
at university think that it's like picking up A Brief History of Time.
Basically true, but for laymen (wonder what a real physicist would think,
heh). In actuality a lot of it is opinion, disguised as science. (In fact I
tend to view a lot of economics like that; Opinions well defended by some sort
of evidence.)

~~~
paganel
> Why write a book at all if it says "we don't know"?

Related to this, someone commented on the /r/AskHistorians discussions linked
by the article [1]:

> What I like about history is that it teaches you humility. Even if you spend
> years researching a small topic, there will be so much that you don't and
> never will know. Political science is the opposite with lots of helicopter
> opinioning. New crisis in Mali? Here I come with my insta-factoids and world
> explanations

The fact is that around these parts of the world (Eastern Europe - The
Balkans) people have started wars and a lot more people have died as a result
of those wars, only because one hundred years ago some historian just couldn’t
say “we just don’t know” after dedicating all of his career to a specific
topic (like “who was the first one between populations A, B and C to have
occupied this land?”). In the meantime historians have smarten up a little,
it’s not all black and white, there are a lot of “maybes”, of “we need more
data to answer that question” or even “this question will probably never be
answered in a satisfactory matter”.

Meanwhile, I’m pretty sure people are dying at this very moment because, like
you said, some political scientist or economist just couldn’t say “we don’t
know” or even “it’s complicated”.

[1]
[https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/16zhk7/as_a_...](https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/16zhk7/as_a_historian_what_is_your_opinion_of_daron/c81f226/)

~~~
hopler
That's not history vs political science, that's academic research va public
policymaking.

~~~
paganel
“Public policymaking” treats a lot of the present political science and
economic discourse as, well, established and tested science, hence all the
troubles I mentioned. The same thing used to happen to history, there were a
lot of past political decisions taken only because an historian had written a
good book or two about a specific subject, but fortunately for historians that
train has passed. That partially happened thanks to people like Popper writing
about the “Poverty of historicism” and about how we shouldn’t treat history
like a “hard science” and especially how we shouldn’t take important policy
decisiond based on what history says or doesn’t say, I feel that economics and
public political science also need their Popper moment.

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NPMaxwell
Two unstated premises here: 1) You can't share quantitative methods in a pop
science book. You can't share with a general audience ideas like multiple
regression, covariance, controlling for confounding factors. 2) There is no
compelling evidence to back up many economic empirical results other than
multiple regression. Some intro stats professors and some Kaggle competitors
would balk at those assumptions.

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Synaesthesia
I thought Ha-Joon Chang’s books on economics were excellent, because they
provided a fresh perspective, and most economic principles are not that hard
to understand anyway, it’s just a highly ideological “science”.

Even Michael Hudson’s books which are full of the jargon of the trade, are
accessible because he explains the nomenclature.

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barry-cotter
This is hilarious only if you understand iff you understand regression.

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Aeolun
The fact that the commentators use such hilariously mad examples is fairly
clear even without it.

