Some genius takes:
The whole Global North/South split is a pet peeve of mine as a social scientist working in development policy. It’s a bunch of outdated garbage from the Cold War that was really just a thinly veiled dogwhistle for ‘white/the good Asians’ and ‘not white’. It doesn’t hold up to any rational examination. South Africa was part of the Global North until white rule under Apartheid ended, and now they’re in the Global South. southern nations.
Real educated economist chimes in:
Jason Hickel is an anthropologist (read: not economist) and degrowther. Despite having no background and seemingly almost no understanding of economics as a field, he somehow continues to get ‘economics’ papers published in reputable journals despite their obvious low quality. But to anyone with a cursory understanding of economics, it should be entirely unsurprising that exports from developing nations to developed are more labor intensive than vice-versa. This is not a novel conclusion and is not ‘appropriation’, but is entirely explained by a concept in economics called comparative advantage.
Another genius owns the article epic style
This paper is a demonstration of why input-output (IO) models are bad for economic research. IO models were used by the soviet central planners to allocate resources. IO models are bad for research for the same reason the are bad for planning. The authors look at “embodied labor” (adjusted for human capital), the idea being that any two things produced by an hour of (human capital adjusted) labor must have the same value (btw, this “labor theory of value” goes back to Adam Smith, and was later promulgated by Marx).
Other facts that the authors’ framework will struggle to explain: why is it that the poor countries that most integrated with global trade networks became rich (s korea, Japan, Singapore) or are otherwise growing quickly (china, Panama, Vietnam)? Why is it that countries with severe barriers to trade with the global north struggle to grow (n Korea, India for second half of 20th century)? That’s very hard to explain if trade with the global north is fundamentally exploitative.
It doesn’t even use math. It pretends to use math then gets pissy and throws out results when reality doesn’t fit into it’s wank-ass prediction curves, like the inflation-unemployment curve which is still taught as a real thing in econ 101, and it isnt until you get into behavioral economics that they start to drop hints that maybe they are wrong on some of their assumptions.
I literally just had a conversation with a PhD in economics where he (while drunk) admitted to me that they have no real idea what is going on in the economy writ large or have any actually consistent principals or practices. Very fun, definitely not worrying stuff.
Philosophical statements dressed up in Cartesian graphs in order to make them look math-y.
Another good example is how many Econ 101 classes teach that banks need to draw from holdings in order to issue loans, as if leverage isn’t a thing.
There’s a whole field of economics dedicated to figuring out whether or not we are in a recession at the current moment. They can’t even tell what is going on in the present, yet they claim to be able to determine what the future brings
I no… it absolutely uses “math”… I sat in the classes. But the equations are like me throwing chicken bones to see what tomorrow’s weather is going to be.
They dress that shit up with a fancy latin phrase “ceteris paribus” like its a fuckin mic drop.
To be less perjorative and more specific, It has very little relationship to more exact scientific statistical assessment (which is what most people mean they think about ‘STEM math’) that is for sure. The math is more like straight fuckin around with formulas mathematics.