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Malia Politzer is the executive editor of piqd.com, and an award-winning long-form journalist based out of Spain. She specializes in reporting on migration, international development, human rights issues and investigative reporting.
Originally from California, she's lived in China, Spain, Mexico and India, and reported from various countries in Africa, Europe and the Middle East. Her primary beats relate to immigration, economics and international development. She has published articles in Huffington Post Highline, The Economist, The Wall Street Journal, Vogue India, Mint, Far Eastern Economic Review, Foreign Policy, Reason Magazine, and the Phoenix New Times. She is also a regular contributor to Devex.
Her Huffington Post Highline series, "The 21st Century Gold Rush" won awards from the National Association of Magazine Editors, Overseas Press Club, and American Society of Newspaper Editors. She's also won multiple awards for feature writing in India and the United States.
Her reporting has been supported by the Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting, The Institute For Current World Affairs, and the Global Migration Grant.
Degrees include a BA from Hampshire College and MS from Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism, where was a Stabile Fellow at the Center for Investigative Journalism.
How Economics Became A Religion
Is economics really a science? Not according to author John Rapley. In this Guardian long read, Rapley makes the case that the discipline is much closer to a religion - complete with a doctrine, ideology, moral code "promising adherents salvation in this world", and even a sort of priesthood with prophets and reformists "who uphold orthodoxy in the face of heresy".
His argument has a certain coherence: he writes how, in an effort to establish economics as a science, it's practitioners:
"had to dispense with scientific method at times. For starters, it rests on a set of premises about the world not as it is, but as economists would like it to be. Just as any religious service includes a profession of faith, membership in the priesthood of economics entails certain core convictions about human nature ... that we humans are self-interested, rational, essentially individualistic, and prefer more money to less. These articles of faith are taken as self-evident".
Yet, when economic data is tested by scientific method, Rapley points out the results are often inconclusive. Take, for example, the two economists who split the Nobel prize in economics in 2013 - one, named Eugene Fama, who asserted that prices created in a market are always correct, and Robert Shiller, who insisted that markets frequently got the price wrong, "a bit of Solomon wisdom that would have elicited howls of laughter had it been a science prize".
Part of the problem, of course, is that unlike hard science, economics relies on human data, and humans do not always act reliably and are prone to changing their minds. Or, as Rapley puts it, "Just as you can find a quotation in the Bible that will justify almost any behavior, you can find human data to support almost any statement you want to make about the way the world works."
So what now? Rapley ends his piece with a call to action: economists must admit the limitations of their discipline. Only then, he writes, can economics serve us once more.
