Ede8 should have an economics forum

Suppose there are two economists who love chatting about economics. Economist #1, furthermore, loves debating economics, whilst economist #2 does not. Economist #1 will come to a debate site regardless of whether there are forums or not because he loves debating. And while economist #2 may come to the site as a result of there being economic discussions here, their lack of interest in debate will mean they won't debate. It may even be the case that economist #2 sparks some discussion which begins a debate for other users, but economist #2 would not be involved in it, because they don't debate. And for those users who are involved, the opportunity cost would be having done some other debate.

It therefore does not follow from my opponent's logic that debates, or even economic debates, would actually increase. Economists who love to edeb8 are not currently stifled by a lack of a forum, because the debate platform is working perfectly without it for economic debates. In fact, we've seen some on this site already, and I think that's great! All of my opponent's statements are true but they do not logically imply or conclude more users will be debating or more debating will happen.

My opponent has the BOP, and he's missing a very important step from his reasoning. He needs to prove why these economists will not only join the site but also why they will give debating a shot. Willingness to participate in discussions does not imply willingness to debate those discussions in a formal setting, even if those same discussions are going to spur more debate-inclined users on to having some debates.

My opponent's first premise assumes that economists do not have sufficient substitutes. We are all debaters, right? But that does not mean we are members of, or even attracted to, every single debate site on the internet. Similarly, there's nothing inherently attractive about an economics subforum, unless it's better than any one of the thousands of forums out there that are wholly dedicated to economics. The first premise is thus faulty - SOME economics forums attract economists, but not ALL economics forums.

Might seem like a throwaway comment, but I take particular exception to these words. Edeb8 works precisely because we keep our member count dedicated to a smaller number of more closely-knit, passionate and awesome debaters. While we welcome anyone who shares our passion for intelligent debate with open arms, we can't just open up our server to unlimited traffic. Doing so would cause all sorts of errors and grind the site to a halt. We could technically use a whole bunch of extra servers at extra cost, but then the issue would be that the value of all these extra servers would no longer be debate. Mostly the site would exist for the purposes of forums.

Far more people like to discuss economics as a casual argument than would like to debate economics formally. The latter requires a higher standard of defending your own position. But many more people simply have an economic opinion that they couldn't defend in a debate. If suddenly 10,000 people with an economic opinion do come, which I don't expect, then it would definitely not be low maintenance.

I made the science subforum in response to user pressure. 75% of the posts on it are me trying desperately to stir up some discussion on something nobody wants to discuss. It's a total waste of the site's resources and has led to neither more science debates, nor even more scientists on the forums. Everybody who has posted in that subforum was already there before the subforum existed.

It shall be the same with economics. Currently economics is explicitly listed as one of the categories for discussion under "society". In society there is only one single economics thread. Compare that with the number of threads for any other area covered (politics, history etc) and you'll see that there's less impetus to create an economic forum than any other aspect of the social sciences. This proposal is entirely pointless.

As an additional harm, when nobody except me if posting in a forum for weeks, everybody else thinks that can't be a very popular spot to hang out, and moves on.

Very few issues are exclusively economic. It's useful for a thread to discuss the wider social implications of an economic idea or policy, such as the history, the geography etc that underlie it. Limiting the subforums to just individual aspects of the social sciences serves exactly no purpose since all the issues of the social sciences will inevitably be discussed therein anyway.

My opponent needs to justify the impetus for an economic forum and why we want to attract economists specifically. My philosophy has always been that, while fostering debate and such, we also want to ensure that the site does not afford a special place to one particular aspect of debating. A debater should be able to debate any topic, on any side. Economics is very specific and opens the floodgates to creating many more, very specific subforums by this principle. Imagine if instead of perhaps nine subforums, site users had to browse through a hundred, to see the problem with that. It might be acceptable for a forum site, but this is not such a site.

The resolution is negated.