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Welcome to rationationally Speaking, the podcast where we explore the borderlands between reason and nonsense.

I'm your host, Julia Galef, and I'm here with today's guest, Professor Chris Ald.

Chris is an applied econometrician at the University of Victoria.

He works on issues related to health, the labor market, education, and he blogs at chrisall.com.

One of the topics that Chris covers on his blog is basically critiques of critiques of economics,

and one of his most widely shared posts, in fact, I think the reason that I encountered his blog in the first place, is titled, 18 signs you're reading bad criticism of economics.

So that's one of the main topics we're going to talk about today. Chris, welcome to rationally speaking.

Hi, good to be here.

Chris, this might be a tough call for you to make, but if you had to pick one or two of the mistakes that people make when critiquing economics from your list that you think are the most common, most common,

you know, bad critiques of economics, what would they be? I think the major mistake people make

is simply misunderstanding what

economists actually do. That's like picking all of them. Yeah. Well, that's the major. So my major

complaint is most people straw man economics. They say economists do X and economists or do or think

X and economists don't do or think X at all. So there's,

...