Feeling guilt for our professions?

[7Wannabe5]

@Dragline: Gotcha. It's like my frustration when people think I am interested in perma-culture due to holier-than-thou motivations when really I am interested in perma-culture because I am a very lazy person who doesn't know of any option besides continuing to live on this planet in the company of other people.

[jacob]

But most popular discussions of economics on the internet and elsewhere are still rooted in pre-World War 2 misconceptions and ideologies. In the future, a lot of what passed for erudition on this subject between 1770 and 1970 is likely to be tossed aside as garbage-in-garbage-out thinking, which much of it is. (At least that would be my hope.)

This is because this is still what's being taught in undergraduate classes. In general, college classes lag current research by about 30 years because it takes about that much time for knowledge to diffuse out from the frontier (professors tend to write books about stuff that's no more advanced than what they themselves learned in grad school---and the average professor age is 50something). The public discourse thus represent state of the art knowledge ranging from 30 years ago (1986) and the oldest college graduate who still write letters to the editor/blog comments, say 1945.

[BRUTE]

The traditional economic theories that most people talk about all descend from Adam Smith's "Wealth of Nations", which include both Marxism/Socialist theories and Capitalist theories, and are fundamentally about material resource allocation.

to take a step back, brute would argue that all systems of any kind are fundamentally about something. and that something is never "humane", because there is no such thing and thus one human's "humane" is another human's "inhumane".

systems, by definition, are inhumane in the sense that they are not about humans. humans in systems are reduced to cogs in a machine, according to whatever function they have in the system. and even if these systems are designed by humans with humane-ness in mind, it's only the designer's version of humane-ness. so even if the designer gets it 100% right, which is unlikely in such a complex and chaotic system as a society full of humans, almost all other humans will disagree with the original vision and therefore find the system inhumane.

now this isn't always bad: humans can be terrible. systems are often designed to overcome human flaws. humans have firefighters and emergency response systems because human nature doesn't lend itself to these things. but humans also have terrible systems with net negative outcomes to some.

[Dragline]

I agree with this for the most part as to modern distinctions between subjects. But when you go back far enough -- usually to the ancients -- all this stuff gets combined in philosophy and religion.

I am always reminded of this by the fact that the word "scientist" was not invented until the early 1800s (in England). Before that, the subject matter was called "natural philosophy". And most of the social sciences were not defined until the latter part of the 1800s or early 1900s. Paradoxically, we're now trying to put them back together to figure out what is actually going on.

[NPV]

Very interesting discussion to read.

Sounds like a good answer to the op's question can be found somewhere here: https://80000hours.org/career-guide/