Wow! You made it all the way to 10:30AM (Pacific
Standard Time) before writing your knee-jerk, WRONG
defense of your stupid belief.


Robert Sturgeon wrote:

On Tue, 23 Dec 2003 06:24:42 GMT, Jonathan Ball
wrote:


Robert Sturgeon wrote:


On Tue, 23 Dec 2003 05:39:47 GMT, Jonathan Ball
wrote:



Robert Sturgeon wrote:



On Tue, 23 Dec 2003 03:13:36 GMT, Jonathan Ball
wrote:




Robert Sturgeon wrote:




On Tue, 23 Dec 2003 02:49:55 GMT, Jonathan Ball
wrote:

(snippage of the rantings of an "expert" with letters after
his name, but no common sense at all)

In other words, you snip out, once again, authoritative
(relative to you) material that you simply cannot
refute, because it is right, you are wrong, and you
don't know what you're talking about.


Still no answer to Greenspan's concerns about investors'
irrational exuberance?

He wasn't speaking as an economist.


LOL. That's rich.

It's the truth. A lot of the fed chairman's job has
nothing whatever to do with economics...and economics,
of course, has nothing to do with psychology.


On Fox News this morning (paraphrasing) "Economists
concerned about lower consumer confidence." Apparently
economists have some way of studying consumer confidence,

No. They aren't concerned with the *why or how* of
consumer confidence AT ALL. All they are concerned
with is objectively measurable phenomena like
purchasing behavior. "Consumer confidence" isn't
measured by any form of psychological testing. It
refers to consumers' statements of their intended
purchases. When consumers state they feel confident
about the future, it is believed they spend on
big-ticket items; when they say they don't feel
confident, they are thought not to spend.

In fact, dummy, most statements by *economists* about
consumer confidence work BACKWARD: economists look at
actual consumer spending on durables, and then they
INFER something about consumer confidence from the
numbers. If consumers are spending on durables,
economists assume consumers really do feel confident
about the future; if durables spending is declining,
economists infer that consumers don't feel confident.

Economists don't study what is going on in consumers'
minds to make them feel "confident" or "unconfident".
That would be something psychologists might study.

and even more apparently, they care what it is.

No, they care about measuring the objective expression
of it.

But since
you say economists don't care about psychology, this must
have been an error.

It is an error in your understanding. The error is not
surprising, given that the sum total of your exposure
to academic economics consists of having perused ONE
introductory textbook for a class in which you were not
even enrolled yourself. In other words, the error is
not surprising given that, effectively, you are utterly
ignorant of economics.

Or were those economists also not speaking as economists?

They were speaking about something that went right over
your head.



Time for a candid admission, bobby: you simply don't
know what you're talking about on the issue. You know
NEITHER economics nor psychology; you were just running
your ignorant mouth.


Casting aspersions on another really doesn't win you any
debating points.

We are talking about your standing to be discussing the
field of economics. You have no standing, as you have
never studied the field, and nothing at all in your
background makes you credible to be pontificating about
what is and isn't in the purview of economics.

Instead, you might consider explaining why
economists study consumer confidence, market sentiment, the
irrational exuberance that powers bubble markets, that sort
of thing - psychological aspects of economics that you
assure us economists don't care one whit about.

They don't. You haven't found what you think you've
found. As a non-expert in the field, you are leaping
to unwarranted conclusions. As a stubborn pig-headed
fool, you are insisting that your non-expert guesses
are right.


I do thank you for your rudeness, because it has prompted me
to do some more research into this matter. I did an Alta
Vista search using the key words: economics and psychology.
It returned 588,142 results.

That's nice. It doesn't tell you a thing about how the
words are combined in the results.

As might be expected from
reading your tirades, it is easy to find articles on the
differences between the two. But it is also easy to find
articles to the contrary. Heres one:

http://www.buzzle.com/editorials/5-30-2002-19412.asp

"It is impossible to describe any human action if one does
not refer to the meaning the actor sees in the stimulus as
well as in the end his response is aiming at.
Ludwig von Mises"

"Economics - to the great dismay of economists - is merely a
branch of psychology. It deals with individual behaviour and
with mass behaviour. Many of its practitioners sought to
disguise its nature as a social science by applying complex
mathematics where common sense and direct experimentation
would have yielded far better results."

In fact, having studied economics - unlike you - I am
very well aware of the fact that the 'Austrian School'
expresses disdain for the mathematization of economics
brought about by the 'English School'. Unfortunately
for you (and the Austrians), the English School,
beginning chiefly with Alfred Marshall, has almost a
monopoly on economics departments in the United States.

The article is quite lengthy. I won't repost it in its
entirety. It was written by an actual economist - "Sam
Vaknin, United Press International Senior Business
Correspondent, columnist for Central Europe Review and
eBookWeb.org, editor in the Open Directory Project, and
former economic advisor to the government of Macedonia and
to blue-chip firms in many countries."

In other words, it is written by a journalist who has
studied economics. That puts him leagues ahead of you,
but doesn't really make him an economist.

It also is ONE source. Goody for you.

It looks like he has
better credentials than you do, and he doesn't agree with
you.

Here's a NEW (i.e., you probably didn't study it at UCLA)
textbook for sale at Amazon.com from Kluwer Academic
Publishers by Gerrit Antonides:

"Editorial Reviews
Book Description
Psychology in Economics and Business is the first textbook
in economic psychology that is targeted at students of
economics and business administration. It describes the
experiments and explains the psychological background
associated with the topics. The book presents the state of
the art in behavioral economics

Ah, interesting. I know two actual, Ph.D. economists
at the Federal Trade Commission, people with whom I was
in the UCLA Ph.D. program. They scoff at and belittle
'behavioral economics' as not really being economics.

[snip stuff that doesn't say what bobby thinks it says]

Anyone else so foolish as to have read this thread so far is
welcome to reach his own conclusion as to whether or not
economics is a subset of psychology. People with better
credentials than Mr. Ball say it is.

(It will be a test of your integrity, which at present
appears to be exceedingly low, if you will leave the
following lengthy material in and respond to it. I
suspect that, lacking integrity and unable to discuss
the topic, you will snip it out.)

You haven't found ANYTHING that shows economics to be a
*subset* of psychology. That some economists are
beginning to become interested in psychology in no way
makes economics a *subset* of psychology. When I was
in UCLA's Ph.D. program and for a considerable period
of time before that, some big name academic economists
were very interested in biology; they attempted to use
certain mathematical models and econometric techniques
to explain in a systematic way phenomena that
biologists had observed but not very well explained.
Some of this in an effort to find analogues with human
economic actors, and some of it was simply to apply the
techniques to unexplained phenomena.

Did it turn economics into a *subset* of biology?
Clearly not; the suggestion would be stupid.

Economics also has borrowed some of the mathematical
techniques of physics, without turning economics into a
*subset* of physics.

A big problem for you, bobby, is that the formal study
of economics, at least in the Anglo-American tradition,
began perhaps 100 years before the formal study of
psychology. In fact, both grew out of *philosophy*.
If you had studied economics, which you haven't, you
might have learned that Adam Smith, author of _The
Wealth of Nations_ and generally considered to be the
father of the systematic study of economics in the
English speaking world, was a philosopher. He also
wrote a book called _The Theory of Moral Sentiments_,
and he considered himself first and foremost a
philosopher, not an economist.

Philosophers have long speculated on all manner of
fields that, ultimately, come to be derived fields in
their own right. That does not make the derived fields
"subsets" of one another. Aristotle speculated about
astronomy, physics, economics, ethics, aesthetics, and
lots more. They all stem from philosophy, not from one
another.

At some point, bobby, you are going to have to accept
that economics began, and largely continues, as the
study of things entirely *outside* the realm of
psychology. Trade flows, the gains from
specialization, the study of what makes a competitive
market: none of these is based in the study of psychology.