... and if economists in general ever want the sort of respect accorded to scientists and medical doctors, then the discipline as a whole must stop auditioning for the role of Emperor's New Clothes.
The financial crisis has gotten me worried at times that I might be turning anti-intellectual. I hear people talk about complicated economic equations and leverage, and ... oh, you know, you've been reading the same things ... it just fills me with white hot wrath and furious anger.
But then I realize that it makes me angry because it reminds me of something that Richard Feynman, a celebrated physicist, said in one of his memoirs, and I realize that whatever ails me, anti-intellectualism isn't it.
So Feynman came to a realization one day when he was talking to a colleague. He asked him to explain some aspect of physics so his grandmother could understand, as Einstein himself said a physicist should be able to do. Not only was his colleague unable to do it in this case, neither could Feynman himself. He concluded that they didn't fully understand what they were talking about.
Feynman, again, was a physicist. I never made it all the way to physics, calculus was grueling enough at the time, but I have it on good authority that it's hard.
As this programmer, also inspired by that principle, said, when people can't explain themselves without speaking in jargon salad, they're either clueless themselves or are trying to baffle you with bull.
No Jargon
Thing is, the real estate market has been a lie for years and some thieving parasites (via) used that lie to defraud the home-buying public. Other thieving parasites decided to steal the profits from employee productivity increases, for about 40 years give or take, which was aided in the meantime by another set of thieving parasites who covered our missing income amidst rising prices with what turned out to be ruinously expensive individual lines of credit. Also, some of them made crazy *ss bets that all of the people they'd been stealing from would eventually get rich enough to pay off their gambling debts.
In shorter, they stole everything that wasn't nailed down. Now they're here for the rest.
In a just world, these people would end up eating institutional food for the rest of their lives and answering to a number. That won't happen because our government decided that policing the wealthy just wasn't their job, they were busy tasering teenagers and blowing up foreigners who never did a goddam thing to any of us. So in this world, the thieves are instead being offered extremely cushy jobs, because politicians believe it when they claim that no one could do the work they do for some pathetic salary like $500,000 a year.
Which is ridiculous, because hedge fund management isn't rocket science and rocket scientists don't make that much.
Is there some equation that washes clean those uncomfortable, dejargonated results? No. And everybody knows it.
Economists of the publicly respectable variety claim that they have the magic formula to the most prosperity ever. Their bluff has been called.
Being Right
In the sciences, people do disagree. Sometimes very heatedly and for many years. But they also look at evidence, especially the predictive kind, and the person who finally gets to say 'I told you so' wins. (Science is about being right, after all, not winning friends and influencing people.)
Given a theory that has any hope of being proven, you're supposed to be able to make accurate, testable predictions about relevant chains of cause and effect.
My favorite example of this is that Darwin used the principles of his evolutionary theory to predict that a flower he saw that had a slender, several inch-long nectar cup must have evolved in parallel with an insect that had a several inch-long proboscis to match. He never saw that insect in his lifetime, but many, many years later, it was discovered just as Darwin predicted it would be.
In economics, the people who were right, whose theories about economic cause and effect most closely matched real world outcomes, are let nowhere near the economic policy-making apparatus. (via)
The people who said deregulating everything and letting white collar criminals do whatever the hell they wanted, except for Martha Stewart, would put a pony in every yard, were wrong. Dead wrong. Very wrong. Obscenely wrong. So wrong it isn't funny. So wrong you have to laugh. WTF are we doing still listening to them when they haven't changed what they're saying?
So if there is a real science buried somewhere in economics, the people who've been right need to be put in charge of it. No more PR hackery wrapped in equation paper.
Value
I've been planning to write something more thoughtful on this topic, economic valuation, for a while now. But I think I have something better.
I just found out this last weekend that I have a retired relative who spends almost her entire Social Security check on a $400/month Medicare supplemental. She was a housewife, she has a pre-existing heart condition, and her Social Security check is practically nothing. One of her kids sold their house to move in with her, to keep their mom from losing her house and having to move away from the family.
That's not all. One couple I know, she lost her job in the recent non-profit employment bloodbath, he just got told he has to take a pay cut along with the rest of his coworkers. I know several people who were out of work for months last year, at least one who's been out of work for over a year now, others who've had to take jobs with much lower pay and benefits than they had only a couple years ago.
The value placed by the government on helping them, and everyone like them all over the country, is not nearly as high as helping the people who stole from all of us. Some pet 'economists' seem to think the American public is a bad investment; unlike the doglickers at AIG. Which isn't only unjust, it makes no sense.
Who's going to make good all the bets that the banksters placed on the public's future ability to pay off debt if none of us have any *ing money?
See? No sense. Can't go very far in science with logic that sloppy.
The financial crisis has gotten me worried at times that I might be turning anti-intellectual. I hear people talk about complicated economic equations and leverage, and ... oh, you know, you've been reading the same things ... it just fills me with white hot wrath and furious anger.
But then I realize that it makes me angry because it reminds me of something that Richard Feynman, a celebrated physicist, said in one of his memoirs, and I realize that whatever ails me, anti-intellectualism isn't it.
So Feynman came to a realization one day when he was talking to a colleague. He asked him to explain some aspect of physics so his grandmother could understand, as Einstein himself said a physicist should be able to do. Not only was his colleague unable to do it in this case, neither could Feynman himself. He concluded that they didn't fully understand what they were talking about.
Feynman, again, was a physicist. I never made it all the way to physics, calculus was grueling enough at the time, but I have it on good authority that it's hard.
As this programmer, also inspired by that principle, said, when people can't explain themselves without speaking in jargon salad, they're either clueless themselves or are trying to baffle you with bull.
No Jargon
Thing is, the real estate market has been a lie for years and some thieving parasites (via) used that lie to defraud the home-buying public. Other thieving parasites decided to steal the profits from employee productivity increases, for about 40 years give or take, which was aided in the meantime by another set of thieving parasites who covered our missing income amidst rising prices with what turned out to be ruinously expensive individual lines of credit. Also, some of them made crazy *ss bets that all of the people they'd been stealing from would eventually get rich enough to pay off their gambling debts.
In shorter, they stole everything that wasn't nailed down. Now they're here for the rest.
In a just world, these people would end up eating institutional food for the rest of their lives and answering to a number. That won't happen because our government decided that policing the wealthy just wasn't their job, they were busy tasering teenagers and blowing up foreigners who never did a goddam thing to any of us. So in this world, the thieves are instead being offered extremely cushy jobs, because politicians believe it when they claim that no one could do the work they do for some pathetic salary like $500,000 a year.
Which is ridiculous, because hedge fund management isn't rocket science and rocket scientists don't make that much.
Is there some equation that washes clean those uncomfortable, dejargonated results? No. And everybody knows it.
Economists of the publicly respectable variety claim that they have the magic formula to the most prosperity ever. Their bluff has been called.
Being Right
In the sciences, people do disagree. Sometimes very heatedly and for many years. But they also look at evidence, especially the predictive kind, and the person who finally gets to say 'I told you so' wins. (Science is about being right, after all, not winning friends and influencing people.)
Given a theory that has any hope of being proven, you're supposed to be able to make accurate, testable predictions about relevant chains of cause and effect.
My favorite example of this is that Darwin used the principles of his evolutionary theory to predict that a flower he saw that had a slender, several inch-long nectar cup must have evolved in parallel with an insect that had a several inch-long proboscis to match. He never saw that insect in his lifetime, but many, many years later, it was discovered just as Darwin predicted it would be.
In economics, the people who were right, whose theories about economic cause and effect most closely matched real world outcomes, are let nowhere near the economic policy-making apparatus. (via)
The people who said deregulating everything and letting white collar criminals do whatever the hell they wanted, except for Martha Stewart, would put a pony in every yard, were wrong. Dead wrong. Very wrong. Obscenely wrong. So wrong it isn't funny. So wrong you have to laugh. WTF are we doing still listening to them when they haven't changed what they're saying?
So if there is a real science buried somewhere in economics, the people who've been right need to be put in charge of it. No more PR hackery wrapped in equation paper.
Value
I've been planning to write something more thoughtful on this topic, economic valuation, for a while now. But I think I have something better.
I just found out this last weekend that I have a retired relative who spends almost her entire Social Security check on a $400/month Medicare supplemental. She was a housewife, she has a pre-existing heart condition, and her Social Security check is practically nothing. One of her kids sold their house to move in with her, to keep their mom from losing her house and having to move away from the family.
That's not all. One couple I know, she lost her job in the recent non-profit employment bloodbath, he just got told he has to take a pay cut along with the rest of his coworkers. I know several people who were out of work for months last year, at least one who's been out of work for over a year now, others who've had to take jobs with much lower pay and benefits than they had only a couple years ago.
The value placed by the government on helping them, and everyone like them all over the country, is not nearly as high as helping the people who stole from all of us. Some pet 'economists' seem to think the American public is a bad investment; unlike the doglickers at AIG. Which isn't only unjust, it makes no sense.
Who's going to make good all the bets that the banksters placed on the public's future ability to pay off debt if none of us have any *ing money?
See? No sense. Can't go very far in science with logic that sloppy.
