this post was submitted on 26 Jan 2026
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I keep calling it a pseudoscience.
Someone told me that I "don't know what a pseudoscience is" and that I was "using the word wrong."
No. No, I know what it is, and I used it precisely the way I meant it.
Wayyy too many people think classic economic theory is a legitimate field...
To be fair, that's like 150 years old, back when they believed in spontaneous generation, and the idea that continents move was absurd and crazy.
Yep somehow the indoctrination system hasn't improved in the past 200 years. It's not just economics either.
And yet the global economy is still operating on the same basic assumptions...
They've been made even worse by further developments of those basic assumptions as expounded by neoliberalism and reaganomics, but the underlying premises are still the same.
The global economy is definitely not being run by economists or anything particularly close to prescribed economic principles. Most countries are being run by some combination of authoritarian and/or populist governments whose economic policy is crafted to benefit either a small ruling class, or to win elections (voted on largely by people who don’t understand economics).
The most obvious example of this is the United States, which is the single largest national economy, and which keeps instituting tariffs despite “tariffs = almost always bad” being one of the first and most foundational tenets of macro econ.
The global economy is being run by capitalist oligarchs, whose central premises for existing are based on classical economic theories (private ownership of capital, extraction of resources, and exploitation of labor), their operational strategies are based on classical economic theories (infinite pursuit of growth at all costs, externalizing risks while internalizing profits, quarterly profit margins being the sole indicator of growth, cutting costs to minimize expenses and manufacturing scarcity to maximize pricing, etc.), and the policies meant to regulate and/or stimulate economic activity are based on classical economic theories (austerity for the poor, supply-side "trickle-down" economics for the rich including tax breaks, subsidies, and bailouts).
The tariffs are an exception attributable to the overt buffoonery of an extortionist grifter running the show. It doesn't negate all the other examples of how classical economic theory is destroying society and the planet.
It's definitely just Maths with feelings sprinkled on top.
If you read a book by any investor they'll talk about the irrationality of the market. They'll say how daytrading should be mathematically impossible, but admit how some people do profit a lot from it.
I wouldn't call it pseudoscience, because it's like mixing maths with psychology.
It's a soft science at best, but some people try to treat it like it's a hard science.
I still hold that it displays characteristics of pseudoscience by operating on unsound premises and unverifiable assumptions though