A Thai court has ordered the dissolution of the reformist party which won the most seats and votes in last year’s election - but was blocked from forming a government.
The ruling also banned Move Forward’s charismatic, young former leader Pita Limjaroenrat and 10 other senior figures from politics for 10 years.
The verdict from the Constitutional Court was expected, after its ruling in January that Move Forward’s campaign promise to change royal defamation laws was unconstitutional.
I’m not sure what you mean about the sombrero potential only being partially observed. It is a principle only, and you could observe it fully by simply making a sombrero shape and putting a ball in the middle and observing how it falls multiple times.
You can see the model do that, but not the actual quantum fields. The transition is supposed to have happened irreversibly once in the instants following the big bang.
The difference is that supply & demand is presented as a foundational and ubiquitous law to high-school students, whereas the sombrero potential is presented honestly.
It was never taught where I went, but that could be. High school teachers should knock it off, if so. It seems to work exactly as theorised in most sectors, bulk commodities being a common example, but there’s definitely other sectors that are broken, some of which I mentioned.
I’m a fan of regulation to address that. So are both orthodox and most heterodox schools, to various degrees.
Either they don’t exist, or your story about that isn’t complete.
I’m sure someone is dumb enough to try it, but I’m actually not convinced it’s widespread. In Canada, we literally just don’t have enough houses for a first-world nation of our population - which has been measured - and all of our tradespeople are swamped. (Sorry if I brought that up already, this has been a long-running thread)
However I’ve never heard of a scientific discipline where there is an “orthodox” school, except in economics. It’s the orthodox school that I have a problem with. Supply & demand is just emblematic of that issue.
Hmm, now that is a good point. There’s various small offshoots of anthropology and psychology, some of which are questionable (there’s people that still use Freud), but nobody really divides it up like that. Alright, you’ve sold me on economics probably having especially bad lab politics.
Right, so the quantum field model is designed to solve the assymetry paradox, but it’s just unconfirmed speculation. It’s a hypothesis, barely a theory, not a law. It’s discussed honestly for the most part, unlike the way orthodox economics discusses supply & demand. Just because you can find something roughly analogous in a hard science doesn’t make the problem substantively the same.
And do you really think supply & demand isn’t taught as a law? We hear the phrase “the law of supply & demand” bandied about whenever anyone does any pop-economics. Do you seriously not encounter that?
And you actually think housing speculation doesn’t happen on a wide scale? Like… what? Again, have you heard people talk about economics before? You said you understood a good amount of it, but you’re denying that housing speculation is real?
https://www.urban.com.au/expert-insights/property-speculation-to-continue-boom-but-will-a-bust-follow
https://www.nber.org/system/files/working_papers/w26457/w26457.pdf
The 2008 recession was literally a housing speculation bubble. I really don’t understand where you get off saying speculation isn’t a thing.
Also, in Canada, your tradespeople are swamped but there are about 1.3 million empty houses.
Here’s a quote that confirms what I just told you:
Even more disturbing are the figures comparing vacant homes to the homeless population of a given country. While Canada ranks lower on this list at 13, it is still not a ranking that we should be proud of at all. It would take just 9% of the over 1.3 million vacant homes in Canada to give every homeless person in the country a place to live.
Like sure, there might be a housing shortage in the market but not in reality. In reality it’s a hoarding problem. We know from the pandemic that governments could house everyone if they simply made it a policy priority, but they don’t.
And as for the “lab politics” of economics, I’m glad you’ve been able to see that issue, and I think that’s a good term for it. The lab politics doesn’t come from nowhere. Sciences advance in a way that is exploitable by capital. When someone discovers a new kind of technology usually it can be turned into a profit. Often the details are obscured by charlatans looking to make a quick buck - see any tech hype cycle for an example of this - but interfering with the scientific process is usually going to be detrimental to the aims of capitalists.
Social sciences are a little different, usually capital can kind of just ignore the policies proposed by social scientists, even if they can cause minor problems for them.
For economics though, when someone like Marx comes along and points out that capitalists are stealing value from the working class and that working class can unite to overthrow their oppressors because in reality those oppressors create nothing and they depend on us, then that has real teeth. That causes problems, of the revolutionary variety. The ruling class has to respond to that, so they will use their influence to fund think tanks, sponsor economics departments that are friendly to them and torpedo institutions that say things they don’t like.
Richard Wolff talks about this:
Sure. I’m a product of the elite top of the American university system. I went to Harvard as an undergraduate. Then I went to Stanford in California to get my master’s degree. And then I went to Yale to get my Ph.D. So, by the normal standards of this profession, I’m the elite product of these institutions.
I was always struck that as I went through these schools, studying history, politics, economics, sociology—the things that intrigued me—I was never required to read one word of Karl Marx. And I remember telling that to my father, who looked in stunned disbelief at the very possibility that an educated person going to such august universities would not be required to at least read people who are critical of the society, simply as a notion of proper education.
Just like kings used to, they have raised up their own class of priests to proclaim to the commoners that their power and wealth is justified and good, and we should all bow to their blessed interpretation of the mystical movements of the market. That’s why they don’t do science, and they quibble on the minutiae of the interpretations of long-dead texts, just like the priesthood did, because they can’t work in the realm of science, because it would destroy their entire project.
And you actually think housing speculation doesn’t happen on a wide scale? Like… what? Again, have you heard people talk about economics before? You said you understood a good amount of it, but you’re denying that housing speculation is real?
Speculation happens, sure. I don’t buy that it drives things way out of equilibrium in the long run. As far as I can tell from a skim, neither do your sources.
And do you really think supply & demand isn’t taught as a law? We hear the phrase “the law of supply & demand” bandied about whenever anyone does any pop-economics. Do you seriously not encounter that?
I also hear about “Murphy’s law”, which is self-evidently not (literally) true in all cases. If you’re teaching an actual Econ 101-type course and you don’t mention market failure, you’re teaching it badly.
The 2008 recession was literally a housing speculation bubble.
Not exactly. A drop in housing prices triggered it IIRC, but the actual chain of dominoes played out on paper in financial instruments.
In an ideal market the big banks would have just been replaced with new ones who take less risks of that sort, but they were too big to fail. That’s definitely a problem, but I don’t really know enough to comment on what the fix should be intelligently; banking economics is on a whole other level.
Also, in Canada, your tradespeople are swamped but there are about 1.3 million empty houses.
The total shortfall is in the neighborhood of 3.5 million units.
There’s always some, just because people move unpredictably - a “frictional” amount. I’m sure someone somewhere is sitting on an empty house for no good reason, but they’re losing money, so I doubt it’s a lot by comparison to the frictional amount.
Homeless people aren’t let in for a really sad reason that has nothing to do with necessity: few voters care and nonprofits can’t raise enough money - or alternately donated space - without government help. A lot of those people have “high needs”, and are at risk of causing damage or just leaving a mess, so it’s not like it’s free to let them stay in a building until the next tenant shows up.
The lab politics doesn’t come from nowhere. Sciences advance in a way that is exploitable by capital. When someone discovers a new kind of technology usually it can be turned into a profit. Often the details are obscured by charlatans looking to make a quick buck - see any tech hype cycle for an example of this - but interfering with the scientific process is usually going to be detrimental to the aims of capitalists.
Capitalism is neither necessary nor sufficient for politics. Look at the USSR and all the various times they flip-flopped on whatever issue or person. Or Republican Spain and it’s many warring factions, if that’s more your idea of non-capitalism.
It’s true that some scientists are on the hook to say things convenient for a sponsor. The nice thing is that a valid observation will stand the test of time regardless of who makes it. Marx made a huge impact on social sciences, and you don’t have to agree with him on any particular thing (left or right wing - he was still a Victorian white man) to appreciate economics as a driver of history. The same goes for marginalism and friends.
Your link isn’t talking about actual housing supply, it is talking about affordability. If you think that addresses my point, you don’t understand what I’m saying. Like on a fundamental level, you don’t get it.
And you keep throwing up vague, unsourced opinions like:
Speculation happens, sure. I don’t buy that it drives things way out of equilibrium in the long run. As far as I can tell from a skim, neither do your sources.
Like, okay? You don’t buy it, but you’re not going to bother much more with it, you’re not going to make an argument, it’s your opinion so you can just handwave anything I say away. If you’re not convinced, fine, don’t be, but there’s literally nothing for me to respond to here.
This is incredibly frustrating. I don’t even know what your point is anymore, you seem to just be knee-jerk arguing with every point no matter how weak or irrelevant your response is, and you seem content to throw up smokescreens of details rather than actually engage with anything in a substantive manner.
You seemed responsive for most of this, so I was giving you the benefit of the doubt, but this is going in circles and you’re not actually taking on board anything I’m saying. Just focus for a second, deal with the speculation thing. Make a point. If you can’t do that, I’m not going to keep giving you the benefit of the doubt.
