Well, it's deferring to experts, but whether economists are experts at anything is a hot debate.

I have a lot of respect for economists, I know several.

They are among the most rational people you shall ever meet. And they are very aware of how incomplete their tools are. But they do a lot with such tools that is worth knowing.

It's only a debate if you reject the very principals of science. I realize we're getting there for a lot of people, but merely disbelieving in science is not a refutal of it.

This ignores so called Austrian economists however, who are just flat out lying to either themselves or everyone else depending on the person.

I think the problem might be that it's difficult to perform experiments in economics due to the size of the thing being measured and the fact that the people making up the economy generally aren't going to be alright with you performing experiments on them.

Economics experiments are actually a thing. You can have natural experiments, or you can uncover patterns in data, or you can try controlled experiments (in microeconomics), though that sometimes just feels like applied psychology. I dunno, I've never formally studied it.

But I have read NBER papers, and can confirm that there is real research. It's not a hard science, but among the social sciences it's pretty rigorous, and often very quantitative. I know how this crowd likes it quantitative.

Many economic concepts are part of our daily life. Supply and demand, comparative advantage, for example.

Multiple experiments are conducted using historic data, for example the 2024 Nobel.

I would like to note that there are many other fields in science which have even more trouble performing experiments, but nobody says that e.g. astrophysics or astronomy is not a science.

Economics isn’t a science though. There’s no scientific rigour to any central banks actions.

You mean these 'liars': https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Austrian-school_econom.... NB 'principles' and 'rebuttal'.

Is there a fundamental repudiation to Austrian economics?

All I know about them is that they don't like funny money, which to me as a systems thinker is perfectly reasonable. At worst you would expect it to be harmful, at best to obscure what is really going on.

Contrary to serious economists Austrians try very hard to avoid specific forecasts, but we all can nonetheless look at their writings and compare what actually happened during every crisis in the last 50 years - and nothing Austrians are postulating proved correct. Or just look at the very last, covid caused one: If you'd been doing prognoses with textbook keynesianism regarding inflation, demand, stimulus effects and so on, you'd been pretty spot on. Just read the old blog posts from krugman from 2020 onwards as an example. The Austrians, by comparison, predicted 5 of the last 0 hyperinflation scenarios correctly.

if you go down the austrian rabbithole weird stuff around praxis starts showing up. which is like logically true but probably unuseful (IMO) and used by the community to shut down any ideas from outside Austrianism.

i think focusing on M0 is also incorrect. the debt money multiplier is a real phenomenon, and at least the psyche of a user of the banking system must be accounted for.

Where mainstream economics is imprecise and frequently inaccurate, and credited with predictive powers it simply doesn't possess, it is at least an attempt to study economic reality.

'Austrian' economics is more akin to a religion, with associated dogma and moral tenets.

Not a valid one at least.

Austrian economics is openly an ideological movement and not a system of empirical predictive theory, and thus is inherently unfalsifiable in the broad sense.

Individual Austrian-school economists sometimes make falsifiable predictions, and they are often (either knowably at the time or determined later) false, but that's a different issue, because, again, those predictions are not grounded (in the predictive sense; while they are in an emotive sense) in the fundamentals of the school in a way which would make falsifying them a “repudiation” for anyone at risk of adhering to the school in the first place.

People who have dedicated multiple years of their lives to this topic, at a bare minimum. Technologists are not knowledgeable in economics, medicine, or the other technical fields they routinely embarrass themselves in. Narcissistic overconfidence can look like expertise to an outsider but it isn't. Being high IQ is a necessary but not sufficient condition.

If you want a center-right take on economics, go to someone like Tyler Cowen. There are also plenty of economists who argue in favor of onshoring some manufacturing under a security/defense as public good argument.

The fact that US gdp and population has grown while energy inputs have stayed flat is an important measure of both the energy efficiency of an economy and the mix of sources of gdp. "Energy intensity" is a measure of PPP gdp per capita per kg of oil. If you want to grow your economy then you either improve energy intensity (get more gdp for the same or less energy) or find new energy sources. China wants to reduce their energy intensity. Yet the author is showing a "graph goes up" to mean "better" with all the confidence of an engineer outside their circle of competence. The US energy intensity has halved since the 1980s - less oil and more IT.

> The US energy intensity has halved since the 1980s - less oil and more IT.

Part of their argument, and arguably also quite apparent fact, is that this is not efficiency improvement - it's just outsourcing the energy-intensive parts of the process abroad. This makes treating energy intensity as a measurement of efficiency just an accounting trick.

It's the same kind of trick as e.g. Germany shutting down its clean power plants, covering the energy deficit by buying electricity produced in coal plants abroad, and then claiming, "look ma, no emissions, no nuclear, so green".

Supply and demand goes both ways. You don't get to outsource the important parts and then claim they don't count because you're just buying - it's not like manufacturing or electricity production are natural phenomena you're just tapping into. The buying is what makes them exist, whether or not it's within or outside your borders.

> what makes you think the author didn't study the topic at all

Because this is George Hotz who is arrogant and enamoured by his own intelligence.

He famously derided Twitter's engineering team as being incompetent and that he could easily rewrite it. He lasted at Twitter for a month, delivered nothing and then resigned.

The average US citizen used to understand the importance of money, how it’s defined, etc. There were entire elections over it (see Andrew Jackson).

Now we’re told it’s too complicated to understand, leave it to the experts in Washington. If we put restraints on their ability to create money bad things will happen.

Separate money and state!