Politicians mostly hang on every word of an economist. They give that art its highest praise (as evidenced in practice) while trying to cherry pick the hard sciences of physics, chemistry and biology.
Briefly I had a computer alias as economystic to make fun of economists for being so soft (which means being incorrect more often). Let’s look at that simple relation that appears to make economics hard. That beginning law of supply and demand I actually see as being mostly correct.
But what do companies do to avoid this law? They try to become monopolies or colluding ogilopolies. Most areas of corporate ownership are run by ogilopolies which mean there are only a small handful of companies controlling the entire market. “See, we’re not monopolies,” the companies might say while making sure they don’t have deals that are much better than the competition.
And I’m not going to bother to tell you about all the times they collude. Just the recent admission from Loblaw Companies Ltd. that they and the very small number of other grocers in the Ontario, Canada market colluded for 14 years by keeping the price of bread artificially high. This was an admission. There is no doubt that these companies colluded.
So the law of supply and demand doesn’t work with monopolies or colluding ogilopolies. The rest of economics is even softer.
Look, I am aware that economists use math all the way up to partial differential equations. This just means that economics is a discipline. It is still an art. Thus it is destined to be wrong more times than the hard sciences.
Still the politicians enjoyed cherry picking in economics so they think they are entitled to do it with the hard sciences.
Global warming has been cherry picked to death by politicians. The number of scientists who say global warming isn’t happening or more recently that men aren’t the cause of global warming are very small. This while there are political groups around the world willing to enrich these scientists and flawed studies. The same thing happened with smoking where some researchers and doctors maintained for years that cigarettes didn’t harm your health. There isn’t even close to a fifty/fifty divide. So instead of giving the two sides equal time, give the 99.9% of scientists who believe global warming 99.9% of the space or speeches or however it goes. The current 50/50 divide is a lie.
And global warming is supported by all three of the hard sciences. The greenhouse effect was found by astronomers and physicists. Chemists supported carbon dioxide and methane amongst others as being greenhouse gases. Biology showed the effect of this on the Earth environment. In many ways all three sciences are in agreement. Global warming is happening, it is caused by man, and it is bad.
So when’s the last time that gravity didn’t work? (physics) Or that a chemical reaction didn’t occur that worked the last time under the same conditions? (chemistry) Or that your DNA wasn’t important? (biology) Many politicians are keeping the truth from their constituents and thus are working against the very people they pretend to be a voice for. Save the cherry picking for the arts.
