Some of the schadenfreude is directed toward struggling MBAs and Ph.D.s in economics, whose patronizing platitudinous advice to the millions of unemployed to become more competitive in the new globalized economy has neither been forgotten, nor forgiven. They helped facilitate the collapse, and encouraged the upper one tenth of one percent to win asymmetric zero-sum games against the middle class. Now they have to become more competitive in minimum wage jobs.
And speaking as someone who has taken graduate coursework in “continental philosophy”, and been walked through the big hits of structural anthropology, Hegelian marxism and Freudian feminism, that graduate macroeconomics class was by far the most ideologically indoctrinating class I’ve ever seen. By a mile. There was like two weeks where the class just copied equations that said, if you speak math, “unemployment insurance makes people weak and slothful” over and over again. Hijacking poor Richard Bellman, the defining metaphor was that observation that if something is on an optimal path any subsection is also an optimal path, so government just needs to get out of the way as the macroeconomy is optimal absent absurdly defined shocks and our 9.6% unemployment is clearly optimal.
There once was an island with a population of 100 dogs. Every day a plane flew overhead and dropped 95 bones onto the island. It was a dog paradise, except for the fact that every day 5 dogs went hungry. Hearing about the problem, a group of social scientists was sent to assess the situation and recommend remedies.
The social scientists ran a series of regressions and determined that bonelessness in the dog population was associated with lower levels of bone- seeking effort and that boneless dogs also lacked important skills in fighting for bones. As a remedy for the problem, some of the social scientists proposed that boneless dogs needed a good kick in the side, while others proposed that boneless dogs be provided special training in bone-fighting skills.
A bitter controversy ensued over which of these two strategies ought to be pursued. Over time, both strategies were tried, and both reported limited success in helping individual dogs overcome their bonelessness -- but despite this success, the bonelessness problem on the island never lessened in the aggregate. Every day, there were still five dogs who went hungry.
The thing about arguing about real-world economic problems based on incredibly loose analogies with completely made-up situations is that you can use it to argue for almost anything. But a made-up situation like this rarely bears any resemblance to the real world.
Production is not a measure of aggregate demand and no-one doing econometrics that I know takes Say's law seriously. Keynes pointed out some of the problems with it oddly enough, but to my knowledge he did NOT propose a "Calc 1 model", although I agree it would be worth looking at if he did.
If aggregate demand were anywhere near the point of full employment, we would see evidence of inflation. We do not. Some prices are rising in nominal terms as the dollar depreciates, but that is quite different.
This book explores the idea that classical economics, despite its severe case of physics-envy, may be "flat-out wrong". The author has a PhD in non-linear systems from Oxford, so I don't think he is a complete crank! I certainly find his arguments to be pretty plausible.
The author has a PhD in non-linear systems from Oxford, so I don't think he is a complete crank!
This is an utterly wrong attitude, and the history of science proved it many, many times when scientists produced total bullshit when they were leaving their area of expertise. It's not always the case, but it happens too often to disregard it.
You mean like Feynman investigating aerospace manufacturing processes and engineering culture at NASA?
Of course, the author of the book is no Feynman - he isn't claiming to be. All he is doing is trying to evaluate the success of economics as a 'scientific' field.
Given the influence that that economics has I think a skeptical evaluation of how it actually performs is a rather good thing.
Okay, and before I enrage anybody else, Einstein was one of my childhood heroes and inspirations, and still is. We can't say that, categorically, all scientists working outside of their realm of expertise produce bullshit, but it notably has happened.
You really read that essay and think "bullshit"? I don't happen to agree with most of the conclusions but I also don't dismiss an argument simply because it uses a single scary word.
> We can't say that, categorically, all scientists working outside of their realm of expertise produce bullshit, but it notably has happened.
Perhaps it has, but Einstein supporting socialism isn't an example of that. Coming out with "herb, derp, socialism is bad, m'kay" smacks of tea party logic. The question is vastly more complex than that. The US has quite a bit of "socialism" and has for a very long time.
Related: if you want to complain that the guy's argument is nonsense, just complain that it's nonsense. There's no need to bring a perceived political orientation into it. The only thing your "tea party" comment does is adds a level of emotional polarization, much like his "socialism" comment before. Please keep such emotional baggage off of hacker news.
>There's no need to bring a perceived political orientation into it.
People need to understand what they're saying. If this guy is going to come on here with an out-of-the-blue judgment on an abstract concept someone needs to point out that he's being simple minded. And in the group most likely to have this particular ignorant behavior are, in fact, the tea party.
>Please keep such emotional baggage off of hacker news.
He brought the emotional baggage here so I stepped up to say it's not welcome in clear and unambiguous terms. If people want to vote us both into the gray I'm good with that. The OP is not getting away with silent contempt from me. Not on hacker news.
Then why post a nonsensical stab at socialism? It screams of simple mindedness and heavy partisan politics (your comment wouldn't even make sense in most of Europe where the politics doesn't get to such ridiculous levels of rhetoric like it does in the states).
