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Opinion on the new SPFL
Topic Started: Aug 12 2014, 03:20 PM (1,116 Views)
Cobardon
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Uncle Smurf
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Naebody
Aug 13 2014, 02:16 PM
vvhatsthatonyourback
Aug 13 2014, 01:51 PM
If a quack science has its own branch of quack science, does that make the branch actually credible and accurate?
Perhaps it's best to direct that question to an economist.
I love the idea of someone working in economics called Shiller.

Yes, it's a modern phrenology. The last crash should have shown that to all. That it hasn't shows an impressive cognitive dissidence among its adherents.
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Setenza
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Knitting with only one needle
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Cobardon
Aug 13 2014, 10:47 PM
Naebody
Aug 13 2014, 02:16 PM
vvhatsthatonyourback
Aug 13 2014, 01:51 PM
If a quack science has its own branch of quack science, does that make the branch actually credible and accurate?
Perhaps it's best to direct that question to an economist.
I love the idea of someone working in economics called Shiller.

Yes, it's a modern phrenology. The last crash should have shown that to all. That it hasn't shows an impressive cognitive dissidence among its adherents.
Or more likely, the economists on each side of the spectrum used the crash to prove why they were right.
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Naebody
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Twat
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Cobardon
Aug 13 2014, 10:47 PM
Yes, it's a modern phrenology. The last crash should have shown that to all. That it hasn't shows an impressive cognitive dissidence among its adherents.
With respect, that kind of argument doesn't make a lot of sense to me.

1. What are economists for? They study the economy, quantify its characteristics and identify causalities. Sometimes they'll predict things, but only in the sense that they attach likelihoods to a range of potential outcomes.

2. Historians are still struggling to understand the causes and catalysts of the credit crunch five years after it happened. That shows the difficulties of predicting it five years earlier. Nevertheless, lots of economists wrote about the various systemic dangers. There are ones you read about, like Roubini, and plenty you don't, like Warburton and -- yes! Isn't his name ironic! -- Shiller.

3. So why were the doomsayers in the minority? Well, had it been a consensus forecast among economists that a crisis was about to happen, the forecast alone would've triggered it. The nature of financial crises is that they're unexpected -- but that doesn't mean they're unpredicted, just nonconsensual. Some outcomes will be considered relatively unlikely against other outcomes, and they'll still have been relatively unlikely even after they occur. This is all a bit like being dealt a royal flush: it's demonstrably statistically improbable. So when it happens, does it prove statistics is charlatanry?

4. Much of science is studying the behaviours of rocks and stuff. Economics is studying people's behaviours, and people are more complicated than rocks. Does that complexity make attempts to quantify their behaviours a bogus science? That seems defeatist, and also a tad disrespectful to the people who've spent their lives trying to improve our collective lot this past 2,000 years. Because god knows, very few got personally wealthy from it.

To quote Mark Buchanan at Bloomberg:

Quote:
 
One problem has been “physics envy” -- a longing for certainty and for beautiful, timeless equations that can wrap up economic reality in some final way. Economics is actually more like biology, with perpetual change and evolution at its core. This means we’ll have to go on discovering new ways to identify useful clues about emerging problems as finance changes and investors jump into new products and strategies. Perpetual adaptation is part of living in a complex world.


There's a full discussion of the "economics as empirical science" debate here
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vvhatsthatonyourback
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wild eyed
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We don't organise our society around unproven theories of biology, Naebs.

Judged even by its own standards, not a straw man argument of it being a science, economics and prominent economists have a horrible record of explaining events, never mind predicting them. Yet they are still taken seriously enough that they define the politics of many a nation.

There are some very interesting things going on at the fringes of economics right now, such as your pet Chartalist sect and others looking at the basics of money, currency and economics. However, the mainstream of economics, which is essentially the free market neo-liberalism that has been an article of faith, continues along as if nothing has happened.



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Naebody
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Twat
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vvhatsthatonyourback
Aug 14 2014, 08:49 AM
We don't organise our society around unproven theories of biology, Naebs.

Judged even by its own standards, not a straw man argument of it being a science, economics and prominent economists have a horrible record of explaining events, never mind predicting them. Yet they are still taken seriously enough that they define the politics of many a nation.

There are some very interesting things going on at the fringes of economics right now, such as your pet Chartalist sect and others looking at the basics of money, currency and economics. However, the mainstream of economics, which is essentially the free market neo-liberalism that has been an article of faith, continues along as if nothing has happened.



Agreed.
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vvhatsthatonyourback
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wild eyed
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I came here for an argument, not to be agreed with.

This is the last you'll hear from me. I'm off to EastFud full time now.

I'm going now.






Goodbye.









That's it, I've gone.
















Really this time.
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