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"Left wing kookiness"
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. |
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