Susan Robertson
1 min readJun 18, 2018

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I am an economist (PhD and all) and an atheist. I clicked on your first link for the laws of economics, and you used the Mises Institute! Well, talk about going straight to the extremists for examples. I think you misunderstand what economist mean when they (we) say something is not falsifiable. It usually means that many people have spent a lot of time trying to prove something is not true and they failed. It’s strictly a math thing, rather than a spiritual belief system.

I am not gonna argue that something is not broken in the state of economics. I studied agricultural economics and went to a (hilarious) meeting between my department and the econ department at my university when I was doing my PhD. My dept wanted to change its name to include the words resource economics and…. The Econ department took serious umbrage that anyone who was only studying agricultural economics might be mistaken for a “real” economist. Teaching economics has become more about whether students can weather the math and less about whether they know anything about the world. In my opinion, it’s pretty broken as an academic discipline. But it is useful! Thinking about trade-offs between competing uses of scarce resources is increasingly important in the face of climate change and globalization and population growth and plastic waste in our oceans and seas.

However, as others have commented, there is a lot going on in modern economics to look at how psychology and economic behaviours interact. Look at Daniel Kahneman’s book Thinking, Fast and Slow.

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Susan Robertson
Susan Robertson

Written by Susan Robertson

Susan is an economist who worked in international development. Interested in food, board games, dogs, and development. Writing about whatever I feel like.

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