But "dead weight", "fairness", and the desirability of time stability (weighed against other considerations) are all judgement calls.

Deadweight loss is not a judgement call, it's an actual calculable amount, effectively the loss of productivity due to the tax. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deadweight_loss

So in this context, how does one calculate what's "socially optimal?"

The problem I have with much of economic theory is that it tries to tie things back to what's beneficial or not to societies and tries to do so through a very thick utilitarian lens. There's often a heavy amount of fairly sophisticated math, statistics, and modeling parading as certainty when the fact is, there's a very high amount of uncertainty in many assumptions and in variety of economic theories that are just hand-waved away. It's not to say the problems economists face are simple, they're actually incredibly challenging and I think it's good economist continue to push for a better understanding of these systems.

My gripe arises when economists masquerade or imply current theory with certainty when in many cases, as if it were a mature science. It simply isn't and far too many use the appearance of certainty hidden in complexity of theory as certainty to push a biased personal agenda or perspective. When you overload terms like efficiency, efficiency in what context? Efficient for whom and through what perspective of the world? Very clear definitions need to be made so I don't question the motives of the attempt of quantification and can look at flaws and oversights that may exist in such metrics.

Most economic theory lacks real empirical evidence because it's just to difficult to play the experiments and interplay of micro, meso, and macroscale systems at a global scale without actually running the experiment (changing policies).

Eh, it's difficult to blame economists, or any other type of scientist here. They all deal with improbability and uncertainty.

It's the politicians and voting public that are the problem.

It's easy to get massive numbers of people to vote for you by giving out is completely wrong as long as you're extremely confident in your presentation of it. It's easy for these political winners to drive the economic systems to collapse while increasing authoritarianism by said false confidence. People want to vote uncertainty away, authoritarianism is one way of doing that.

The first sentence in the article is: "Deadweight loss ... is a measure of lost economic efficiency when the socially optimal quantity of a good or a service is not produced."

But there is no link for "socially optimal", and the phrase appears nowhere else in the article, so this definition is incomplete at best and vacuous at worst because its meaning turns entirely on the meaning of "socially optimal" but I can't think of any reasonable way to define it that is not a judgement call.

You are right, wikipedia is not a great source for economics. I just reached for it first because it's generally decent for most things. You can find a great definition in https://bankicollege.ac.in/wp-content/uploads/2020/12/Princi... but simply it's difference between the surplus before and after an intervention. Obviously minimizing deadweight loss isn't our end goal, it's just one measure we can use to compare interventions.

While not an economist, I've read enough economic papers that I actually agree with Wikipedia's definition. You can "plug-in" values to your dead weight loss calculation depending on judgement calls. For example, do you consider the fact that the carbon footprint of an object is ignored a subsidy? If so, your dead weight loss calculation changes. Suddenly you're trying to discount cash flow against the future cost of carbon removal and things are very complicated.

> when the socially optimal

Technically Pareto optimal. Pareto optimal points are not necessarily socially optimal.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pareto_efficiency

Maybe its just the way things are described on Wikipedia, but isn't there an almost complete lack of citing any experiments or empirical evidence on that page?

I'm not sure what you mean. Deadweight loss is tautological. Maybe you're asking for evidence that taxes distort markets? If you accept that as true it's easy to see that deadweight loss is just the difference in surplus before and after the tax. Every econ paper on tax policy will try to measure the deadweight loss of the intervention.

I guess I just find it weird to have a page on Wikipedia about a quantity with no mention of what that quantity has ever been measured to be?

Wikipedia is a very difficult way to learn economics. In many ways it's like trying to learn mathematics or physics from an encyclopedia. The encyclopedic approach is - pedagogically speaking - sub-optimal.

But if I look at the page for "friction" it has tables of actual values and many references to practical experiments?

NB I was just comparing the writing style of that page (which seemed a bit odd to me) with other examples.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Friction

If you go look at the theories, you will find that economics uses a lot of those overloaded terms, but they have perfectly reasonable objective meanings for them that are different from the popular subjective meaning.

OK, but it doesn't help to answer a question posed by a layman using overloaded terms of art without defining them, or at least providing references, or at least pointing out that the words you are using do not mean what they mean in common usage.

So where do I find these definitions? Because I am still highly skeptical that they can be defined in ways that do not conceal hidden judgement calls.

If we applied that same standard when talking about programming here, we would never get past talking eli5 semantics and definitions.

You can be skeptical, but the cure for that skepticism is something more akin to taking an undergrad course, or two.

No, they really aren't.

- Lacking time stability means no one tomorrow has any incentive to stick to the policy, and means the policy is unlikely to succeed in its objectives.

- Deadweight is lost efficiency

- The only arguable one is "fairness", and to clarify I blunted the term to avoid the nuance of explaining Pareto optimality. But sure, we can also consider egalitarianism and other moral frameworks.

> - Lacking time stability means no one tomorrow has any incentive to stick to the policy, and means the policy is unlikely to succeed in its objectives.

That's true, but time stability means that a bad policy is going to be maintained even in the face of evidence that it is bad. Deciding which is worse is, as I said, a judgement call.

> Deadweight is lost efficiency

The flip side of increased efficiency is decreased resilience. Without unused capacity (i.e. inefficiency) the slightest contingency will send the entire system into chaos. How much inefficiency you want to maintain as a hedge against contingencies is a judgement call. Different people have different risk postures.

> Pareto optimality

I think it's safe to assume that people on HN understand Pareto optimality (or are capable of looking it up). Do you really think that Pareto optimality is synonymous with "fairness"?

> we can also consider egalitarianism and other moral frameworks.

Of course we can consider these things. But that doesn't answer my question, which is how do we address them in a principled way that doesn't degenerate into a political dispute?

Many industries got rid of deadweight only to find during the pandemic they and their industry had lost resilience when circumstances changed (which they always do).

See: CPUs and GPUs in 2020-2021, baby formula in 2022, etc.

It can absolutely be a judgment call.

Deadweight loss refers to a net reduction in consumer+producer surplus within the economy.

It has nothing to do with the everyday meaning of the term “deadweight”.

TIL

deadweight loss has a specific meaning in economics.

TIL