It is progressives and socialists that believe that economics is sufficiently scientific that the government can use it to run and control the economy effectively; they use economic theory as the justification for everything from Keynesian stimulus programs to reforming health care and making climate predictions.
Then they probably aren't the problem party either.
Free market advocates say that economics is so broken that using it as the basis of government policy is the equivalent as mandating the use of faith healing in health care.
Well, there we go. That's a party that might do it. Note they aren't Republican either.
Existence of system != systematic. Especially, if they're not really adhering to the system. If I tell you I'm using some system developed by French dudes from 1321 and then I tell you what you want to hear, then I'm not really following the system.
You answered your own question. It's also worth noting here that there isnt' one such system and none of these systems have predictive power.
I'll also point out that it's not systematic. They haven't checked if asteroids matter, for example, or the motion of the stars. Nor have they come up with any sort of causation by which subtle motions of objects in space can impact someone's entire life on Earth. And finally, it's worth noting that almost no one is actually doing any sort of study here. It's mostly collecting money from dupes and tailoring the usual vague stuff to a person's expectations.
While that is uncomfortably close to what a lot of nominal economists do, it's not science.
I don't know that modelling economic systems (simplified, abstracted, self-contained) is really an "experiment".
Of course it is. Just like it is in any other science where you can conduct such experiments. Abstraction and simplification are key tools in setting up experiments.
You can only test your understanding of your own toy model.
So what? You have yet to demonstrate that this is relevant. It's worth noting here that the deliberately limited scope of economics (and the various tools, such as markets) tends to filter out most of that "uniqueness" and other complexity just like climate filters out short term weather.
You mean a competitive process that is left to anneal for a period of time?
Annealing is an asymptotic process. While that goes on to an extent in most markets, it's not the primary purpose of them.
He knows what he was able to invest that was sufficient to produce the orange. He does not have any idea, or concern, about whether his investment covered the costs from his suppliers (human, corporate or natural).
Even if the above sentences were something we should care about, he could find out from the papers or gossip the above information. And he will care if a supplier changes their prices that they offer for one or more of his inputs.
Nor does he know for t>0 that his costs will be covered by the market price, it may happen he has to sell for a loss. He has some historic data about market prices for oranges that may or may not hold true leading him to believe that he can sell profitably (or he'd probably get out of the business), but at any time that can change arbitrarily. He will then be forced to sell for a loss.
You are using a sense of "know" that is completely irrelevant to the real world. Nor is it a standard we would use for the rest of the sciences. After all, maybe the sky gods are faking all of physics and we'll turn into a frictionless cloud of invisible pink unicorns tomorrow. You don't know otherwise.
All we know about economics for sure is right there. We look at markets of things based on sales prices, not any actual truth or concrete data.
The market is the sufficient standard of truth in this case. Use the right truth-seeking tool for the right job! Also sales prices are concrete data!
You wouldn't use pure philosophy to determine the mass of the electron, you'd use physical measurement and a sufficiently accurate model of the electron for your purposes (an application of "the" scientific method). Similarly, you don't use pure philosophy to determine the price or valuation of an orange, you use a market.
You asserted that at "no level in the universe" can you establish the value of an orange. Markets do that every day at the scale that matters.
Khallow, your definition of science as any systematic study is incorrect, because to astrologists, they think they are doing a systematic study.
Why do astrologists' opinions invalidate the definition of science?
As a scientist, I think a more rigorous definition would be a systematic study based on the scientific method which includes falsifiability as per Popper.
Which is done in economics too.
How do you falsify a theory in economics?
The same way you invalidate it in any other science under the Popper scheme.
You can argue against the tenets put forward, but you can't do controlled experiments in an attempt to see if the null hypothesis is true or false.
Yes, you can. There's a lot of experiments in economic games, for example.
Why would Republicans discredit their primary justification for doing anything? I'd say if such a thing is happening, it's either a convenient Emmaneul Goldstein moment (with a unifying moment for the unclued) or a ploy by a party that routinely headbutts economics.
Having said that, I'm not seeing the alleged extra hate this year.
but at no level in the universe can you establish the value of an orange at X resources/unit
This is the only concrete assertion you made, and we already know it is false. Markets establish price for the orange (which a commonly accepted value for mass producers of oranges) and the producer of the orange already knows what inputs went into making that orange.
The vast majority of bad loans would have never been made if the bankers didn't have the equivalent of a gun to their heads - The Community Reinvestment Act.
It would have happened anyway. There was easy money to be made and enough leverage to move the Moon.
Astrology is a systematic, empirical study of the relationship between the alignment of planetary bodies and the observable traits and behavior of humans.
If a dump truck rear ends your shitty Pinto and you die in a ball of fire, it may be the fault of you or the other driver, or the fault of the engineers, but it's not the fault of physics.
A systematic, empirical study of a subject is a science by definition.
it has heavy political overtones
So does climatology and pharmacology.
human behavior
You forgot to wiggle your fingers mysteriously while you typed that. And I guess economic systems that don't have significant human involvement like HFT or the ecology of flowers and pollination can be safely ignored.
How do you think that treachery will go down with the people inside?
Also, this a case of us versus them. If the leader doesn't betray the group, then they're going to care a whole lot less about who gets betrayed outside the group.
There won't be many of them, they aren't going to have the keys to the kingdom, there is going to be more than one entrance, and they are not likely going to have access to any armory.
Yea, right. I think we're already seeing problems with your assumptions. They're maintenance people with long term access to the site. They'll have the keys to the kingdom. Plus, their boss might be in on it as well. Just because he's taking payment now doesn't mean he'll honor that agreement later.
And who do you think is going to let their families through if they aren't admitting other people? Do you think they are all going to be in on it?
You assume those families aren't already in the complex.
That isn't likely to work, and would be very dangerous for them to try if any of them were foolish enough to do so. I doubt the incoming people would regard it kindly, and I doubt they would all be unarmed.
Depends on what they brought. Just collapsing the entrances would probably keep them out.
Now, you might notice that I use words like "might" and "would". I don't think there's some law of nature that this will happen. I just think it's foolish to assert as you have that things will go a certain way no matter what happens. I think I just state the painfully obvious when I note that even in a healthy society that's not in a state of disaster, people betray each other all the time for modest gain. It's not even remotely a stretch to think that they'd do that when society is falling apart and the repercussions to betrayal may be that they get to survive.
"Actually" it is and your comment reflects a poor understanding of the topic which has near universal acceptance from both liberal and conservative academics on the subject. A simple look at first world democracies and third world ones clearly illustrates this point. This point is about as non controversial as they come in political science.
There's always someone to mouth off about how sciency their religious opinion is. A "simple look" would have ignored that wealth inequality is getting better in the developing world countries with the supposedly deficient democracies and not so in most developed world democracies. The reason is simple. Labor is the source of wealth for those below a certain level of wealth. Labor in the developing world is increasing in the price it can command while it is declining in the developed world.
Of course our Right does nothing to do this while the Left's advocating for things like affordable pre school and what equates to free associate degree educations does exactly that.
I guess that depends on what is "Right" or not. I've dropped that term for the most part because it just makes you dumb to think in that limited way.
Your examples ignore that affordable pre school care is affordable only as long as society can afford it. Similarly, free associate degrees aren't free. Someone pays for them and that's generally through income tax - making US labor more expensive in the process. Further, a huge part of the cost of education in the first place is someone being helpful and piling on various subsidies and regulations to drive up the price of the product.
The only realistic way to get people of the desirable skills mix in an emergency at on out of the way location is to recruit them before hand
Or take in people with the desired skills from the neighborhood. None of the skills I mentioned are so rare that you can't find them in a moderate-sized town.
Furthermore, you're ignoring the reactions of the other people there. It is likely that people are recruited by word of mouth. How do you think they will react if friends or family are treacherously excluded? Peaceful acquiescence? I doubt it.
No different that it would be otherwise.
As I said, your plan isn't practical and obvious, it is the reverse of that, and treacherous to boot.
Ok, it's practical, obvious, and treacherous. Not seeing the argument against it.
How do you think that treachery will go down with the people inside?
Depends. They might be just fine with it. Their survival is at stake.
You certainly seem to despise that "useless family".
Again, I do not. That's your imagination not mine. "Useless" has a very specific context here: have skills and generally good health and can contribute to the survival and success of the people currently in the bunker.
Slashdot Mirror
It is progressives and socialists that believe that economics is sufficiently scientific that the government can use it to run and control the economy effectively; they use economic theory as the justification for everything from Keynesian stimulus programs to reforming health care and making climate predictions.
Then they probably aren't the problem party either.
Free market advocates say that economics is so broken that using it as the basis of government policy is the equivalent as mandating the use of faith healing in health care.
Well, there we go. That's a party that might do it. Note they aren't Republican either.
Where would we be, if we didn't have book authors to troll the internets? Banging rocks in caves, I tell you.
Existence of system != systematic. Especially, if they're not really adhering to the system. If I tell you I'm using some system developed by French dudes from 1321 and then I tell you what you want to hear, then I'm not really following the system.
You answered your own question. It's also worth noting here that there isnt' one such system and none of these systems have predictive power.
I'll also point out that it's not systematic. They haven't checked if asteroids matter, for example, or the motion of the stars. Nor have they come up with any sort of causation by which subtle motions of objects in space can impact someone's entire life on Earth. And finally, it's worth noting that almost no one is actually doing any sort of study here. It's mostly collecting money from dupes and tailoring the usual vague stuff to a person's expectations.
While that is uncomfortably close to what a lot of nominal economists do, it's not science.
Price is a value. There are other values too, but these don't tend to be readily available to a trader.
I don't know that modelling economic systems (simplified, abstracted, self-contained) is really an "experiment".
Of course it is. Just like it is in any other science where you can conduct such experiments. Abstraction and simplification are key tools in setting up experiments.
You can only test your understanding of your own toy model.
You can say the same of any scientific theory.
Nothing about the Method has a success rate requirement.
It's implied. We don't do the scientific method because we have too much time on our hands or we worship failure.
So what? You have yet to demonstrate that this is relevant. It's worth noting here that the deliberately limited scope of economics (and the various tools, such as markets) tends to filter out most of that "uniqueness" and other complexity just like climate filters out short term weather.
You mean a competitive process that is left to anneal for a period of time?
Annealing is an asymptotic process. While that goes on to an extent in most markets, it's not the primary purpose of them.
He knows what he was able to invest that was sufficient to produce the orange. He does not have any idea, or concern, about whether his investment covered the costs from his suppliers (human, corporate or natural).
Even if the above sentences were something we should care about, he could find out from the papers or gossip the above information. And he will care if a supplier changes their prices that they offer for one or more of his inputs.
Nor does he know for t>0 that his costs will be covered by the market price, it may happen he has to sell for a loss. He has some historic data about market prices for oranges that may or may not hold true leading him to believe that he can sell profitably (or he'd probably get out of the business), but at any time that can change arbitrarily. He will then be forced to sell for a loss.
You are using a sense of "know" that is completely irrelevant to the real world. Nor is it a standard we would use for the rest of the sciences. After all, maybe the sky gods are faking all of physics and we'll turn into a frictionless cloud of invisible pink unicorns tomorrow. You don't know otherwise.
All we know about economics for sure is right there. We look at markets of things based on sales prices, not any actual truth or concrete data.
The market is the sufficient standard of truth in this case. Use the right truth-seeking tool for the right job! Also sales prices are concrete data!
You wouldn't use pure philosophy to determine the mass of the electron, you'd use physical measurement and a sufficiently accurate model of the electron for your purposes (an application of "the" scientific method). Similarly, you don't use pure philosophy to determine the price or valuation of an orange, you use a market.
You asserted that at "no level in the universe" can you establish the value of an orange. Markets do that every day at the scale that matters.
If a field makes assertions that are always falsified with a little effort, then that's a strong indication they aren't a science.
Khallow, your definition of science as any systematic study is incorrect, because to astrologists, they think they are doing a systematic study.
Why do astrologists' opinions invalidate the definition of science?
As a scientist, I think a more rigorous definition would be a systematic study based on the scientific method which includes falsifiability as per Popper.
Which is done in economics too.
How do you falsify a theory in economics?
The same way you invalidate it in any other science under the Popper scheme.
You can argue against the tenets put forward, but you can't do controlled experiments in an attempt to see if the null hypothesis is true or false.
Yes, you can. There's a lot of experiments in economic games, for example.
What would falsify private property, copyright and patents?
They aren't theories and hence, it doesn't make sense to speak of falsifying them.
1. It has not a single quantity that can be unambiguously defined.
People, materials, and the usual hard science parameters.
2. It has not a single quantity which two people in different places can measure, and get nearly the same result.
See above.
3. It has not a single law with predictive force.
Counterexample is the supply and demand model.
Why would Republicans discredit their primary justification for doing anything? I'd say if such a thing is happening, it's either a convenient Emmaneul Goldstein moment (with a unifying moment for the unclued) or a ploy by a party that routinely headbutts economics.
Having said that, I'm not seeing the alleged extra hate this year.
but at no level in the universe can you establish the value of an orange at X resources/unit
This is the only concrete assertion you made, and we already know it is false. Markets establish price for the orange (which a commonly accepted value for mass producers of oranges) and the producer of the orange already knows what inputs went into making that orange.
It's a bunch of bullshit rules we've put in place to keep the current system moving forward.
In other words, it works.
The vast majority of bad loans would have never been made if the bankers didn't have the equivalent of a gun to their heads - The Community Reinvestment Act.
It would have happened anyway. There was easy money to be made and enough leverage to move the Moon.
Astrology is a systematic, empirical study of the relationship between the alignment of planetary bodies and the observable traits and behavior of humans.
No, it's not.
We routinely do falsifiable experiments in economics.
If a dump truck rear ends your shitty Pinto and you die in a ball of fire, it may be the fault of you or the other driver, or the fault of the engineers, but it's not the fault of physics.
Economics is not a science. It is a study
A systematic, empirical study of a subject is a science by definition.
it has heavy political overtones
So does climatology and pharmacology.
human behavior
You forgot to wiggle your fingers mysteriously while you typed that. And I guess economic systems that don't have significant human involvement like HFT or the ecology of flowers and pollination can be safely ignored.
How do you think that treachery will go down with the people inside?
Also, this a case of us versus them. If the leader doesn't betray the group, then they're going to care a whole lot less about who gets betrayed outside the group.
There won't be many of them, they aren't going to have the keys to the kingdom, there is going to be more than one entrance, and they are not likely going to have access to any armory.
Yea, right. I think we're already seeing problems with your assumptions. They're maintenance people with long term access to the site. They'll have the keys to the kingdom. Plus, their boss might be in on it as well. Just because he's taking payment now doesn't mean he'll honor that agreement later.
And who do you think is going to let their families through if they aren't admitting other people? Do you think they are all going to be in on it?
You assume those families aren't already in the complex.
That isn't likely to work, and would be very dangerous for them to try if any of them were foolish enough to do so. I doubt the incoming people would regard it kindly, and I doubt they would all be unarmed.
Depends on what they brought. Just collapsing the entrances would probably keep them out.
Now, you might notice that I use words like "might" and "would". I don't think there's some law of nature that this will happen. I just think it's foolish to assert as you have that things will go a certain way no matter what happens. I think I just state the painfully obvious when I note that even in a healthy society that's not in a state of disaster, people betray each other all the time for modest gain. It's not even remotely a stretch to think that they'd do that when society is falling apart and the repercussions to betrayal may be that they get to survive.
"Actually" it is and your comment reflects a poor understanding of the topic which has near universal acceptance from both liberal and conservative academics on the subject. A simple look at first world democracies and third world ones clearly illustrates this point. This point is about as non controversial as they come in political science.
There's always someone to mouth off about how sciency their religious opinion is. A "simple look" would have ignored that wealth inequality is getting better in the developing world countries with the supposedly deficient democracies and not so in most developed world democracies. The reason is simple. Labor is the source of wealth for those below a certain level of wealth. Labor in the developing world is increasing in the price it can command while it is declining in the developed world.
Of course our Right does nothing to do this while the Left's advocating for things like affordable pre school and what equates to free associate degree educations does exactly that.
I guess that depends on what is "Right" or not. I've dropped that term for the most part because it just makes you dumb to think in that limited way.
Your examples ignore that affordable pre school care is affordable only as long as society can afford it. Similarly, free associate degrees aren't free. Someone pays for them and that's generally through income tax - making US labor more expensive in the process. Further, a huge part of the cost of education in the first place is someone being helpful and piling on various subsidies and regulations to drive up the price of the product.
The only realistic way to get people of the desirable skills mix in an emergency at on out of the way location is to recruit them before hand
Or take in people with the desired skills from the neighborhood. None of the skills I mentioned are so rare that you can't find them in a moderate-sized town.
Furthermore, you're ignoring the reactions of the other people there. It is likely that people are recruited by word of mouth. How do you think they will react if friends or family are treacherously excluded? Peaceful acquiescence? I doubt it.
No different that it would be otherwise.
As I said, your plan isn't practical and obvious, it is the reverse of that, and treacherous to boot.
Ok, it's practical, obvious, and treacherous. Not seeing the argument against it.
How do you think that treachery will go down with the people inside?
Depends. They might be just fine with it. Their survival is at stake.
You certainly seem to despise that "useless family".
Again, I do not. That's your imagination not mine. "Useless" has a very specific context here: have skills and generally good health and can contribute to the survival and success of the people currently in the bunker.