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1. Hypolite Petovan (hypolite@friendica.mrpetovan.com)'s status on Tuesday, 20-Sep-2022 17:11:02 EDT Hypolite Petovan
   Social sciences often get criticized for not being sciences or too ideological, not always undeservedly, but I came to realize that economics are actually worse on both fronts. The ideological bias is in favor of the status quo, so it doesn’t warrant attention-grabbing headlines.
   1. Hypolite Petovan (hypolite@friendica.mrpetovan.com)'s status on Tuesday, 20-Sep-2022 18:23:20 EDT Hypolite Petovan

      in reply to
      Case in point, today a French self-declared doctor of economics tweeted the following:

      The new subway line in <French city> costs 1.342 billion € with the goal of transporting 110,000 riders/day, so 12,200 €/person, the price of a car! It's the choice of collectivism🤮
      ➡️We are building TOO MUCH public transit in France

      When rightfully criticized on the method of comparing completely unrelated numbers, he doubled-down:

      110,000 riders/day is a goal, and the same person can make multiple trips the same day (<French city>: 215,000 residents), so it would be more than 12,200 € per user (for the cost of construction). Even worse!

      Now, I know exactly why he published both of these tweets, he worked from the conclusion back and used whatever numbers were on hand to prove his point. But to see this process used by a self-declared doctor of economics casts an awful shadow on the university program he may have followed and possibly on the whole academic field at once.
      1. Hypolite Petovan (hypolite@friendica.mrpetovan.com)'s status on Wednesday, 21-Sep-2022 10:31:50 EDT Hypolite Petovan

         in reply to
         Oh no, he tripled down!

         I'm comparing the acquisition price of different means of transportation, OK? And a subway implies infrastructure, while cars don't necessarily. The amortizing and operating costs are something else, not necessarily to the benefit of the rail when you see the subventions for <a couple of French transport authorities>

         We're now so far away from the original point which was, for the people who just joined, "collectivism is bad", that we have reached stratospheric levels of bad faith or abyssal levels of ignorance, you decide.