Vivat Libertas

Neoclassical economics is failing. I would go so far as to say that this is no longer controversial; its flaws have been known about for many decades now. Many, many fields have sprung from this failure - I would say that this is an extremely good thing. Some readers might wonder why I'm writing about economics at all. Importantly, I'm not an economist and have no formal training in the subject - I'm a vaguely interested party. I'm about as qualified as the pub bore (or most politicians) to tell you about the efficacy of various models; the difference is that I know I'm out of my depth. I am going to be discussing the perception of one particular field within economics, based on my experience with related fields. A more general concern is: why talk about the economy at all? Everyone talks about the economy. Everyone else is fed up of hearing about the economy, fed up of hearing about why the economy means that the rich have to get richer and the poor have to...

Obligatory disclaimer: I'm not a statistician or a sociologist. My qualifications come from being a physics undergraduate, where I live and breathe error analysis in the lab, and also from reading around the subject. Finally, I use Twitter far too much; it's really just morbid fascination at this point. Oh well. Last year, Twitter introduced polls as a thing you can add to your tweets. This was more likely than not done to poke Twitter into being vaguely profitable, since it's stagnant as hell. Unfortunately, polls are only as good as the people making them and Twitter is a wretched hive. There have been some really good polls not used as polls - for example, a wacky choose-your-own-adventure romp which started with swiping left or right on a famous politician's Tinder profile - but Sturgeon's Law applies and most polls are...well...crappy. "Why are Twitter polls so bad?" you might ask. Turns out that addressing the how instead of the why is far m...