https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jO4YXFz5_ac
I think this is a pretty great video explaining who's really to blame for this one.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jO4YXFz5_ac
I think this is a pretty great video explaining who's really to blame for this one.
Very good and thorough over-view of the situation. I want to broaden his eyes a bit more when he talks about the current manifestation of how the government enforces these laws.
http://www.reddit.com/r/AskLEO/comme...e_much/cjpgcbe
Not just what we make illegal, but how we deal with those people contributes to the current state of things.
And yeah, the root of the problem is the power to kill and who should have it. Brute strength is the ultimate form of strength and sequestering it into a gov't which answers to the people seems to me the best shot we have. Our half-distributed (right to bear arms) half-centralized set up right now is only one of a myriad of bad choices.
People answer to themselves / each other more than the government answers to the people. If the store owner got fed up with the guy selling loosies in front of his store and took matters into his own hands, and things escalated in exactly the same way and resulted in Garner's death, the legal system would do a pretty decent job of determining liability or lack thereof in that case. But in this case the state police is heavily insulated from any liability.
Honestly, in my opinion the officer probably shouldn't have gotten indicted, as he is an agent of the state and bears very little of the blame for his actions. It would be like arresting Al Capone's butler or chef, or like executing every low level guy in the SS after WWII. These guys serve at the behest of the state, and according to the state if you break ANY law, no matter the severity, and if you resist arrest or prosecution, the penalty is death. If you forget to pay your parking ticket, eventually armed men are going to come to your house, and if you react to them in any other way but submission, there is a very real chance you will be killed. The policemen who will kill you will probably be decent people who would have very little culpability in such a situation.
So all the people who are pissed off that the grand jury didn't indict are IMO completely missing the point. If the defendant was the state of new york, or the USA, indict away. But these guys are doing their job exactly the way the state wants them to, no question about it. Indicting them would be like beating your dog for bringing you the paper.
Yeah, we're seeing eye to eye on this one.
Either we, one, take a German attitude towards criminals with an eye towards rehabilitation and lower prison sentences and legal penalties across the board to relieve the pressure that exists between law enforcement and the enforced OR, two, somehow do away with the government's monopoly on the legal authority to kill.
When you say, "People answer to themselves / each other more than the government answers to the people." I'd say you'd be hard pressed to find move influence over central brutal authority than what we've got here in the US of A. People will always answer to themselves and others, but that's after they answer to the guys who can kill them.
My anarchist friends would say yes, I personally am not such an idealist. But I think you can really reduce the negative effects of government by increasing property rights. I think the store owner should own the sidewalk in front of the store, and I think he has the right to call security to escort Garner from the store premises. I think the road in front of the store should have a owner as well, and I think that owner should have the right to call security to escort Garner from the road premises. I think you see where this is going.Quote:
Originally Posted by a500lbgorilla
When everything has an owner, shit like this becomes pretty damn trivial. Also, I doubt you'd see many negligent deaths caused by the security firms I'm hypothesizing, since they'd face massive bankruptcy-threatening liability for such deaths, unlike the state which isn't going bankrupt any time soon and isn't nearly as easy to litigate anyway.
The police are quite necessary in a world where the state owns like 30-50% of the land of the country, 100% depending on how you see it. They aren't as necessary when people own their own land and property. The police are quite necessary in a world where like 72% of the things people want to do are illegal or require a license to practice. They aren't as necessary when the only laws are against aggressive acts like murder, theft, and fraud.
I tried to clean up my post because it was getting messy.
Massive legal battle in a legal system that doesn't have the gov'ts monopoly on violence to back up the rulings? No one would ever pay.Quote:
Originally Posted by Renton
Well like i said, in such a case the government would exist to enforce law, there just wouldn't be as many laws and there wouldn't be as much public space.Quote:
Originally Posted by a500lbgorilla
That said, private arbitration and law is possible in a free society, search "law without government" on youtube. And private arbitration is already used to settle disputes by people who aren't interested in dealing with the state.
I like this too. And it reminds me of America circa the 1790s.Quote:
Originally Posted by Renton
Snark aside, these videos where people play free-form imagination and pretend to know how people will interact rub me the wrong way. People will have incentive to break the rules and so the rules will be broken and patched and broken and patched and eventually you'll be far off from your ideal. Like America circa the 2010s.
Also, Renton, just because I have your attention.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xOhb4LwAaJk
I hate this argument because there's no counter to it. It's status quo bias. A free society is virtually unimaginable because nothing like one has ever existed. So I think people who hypothesize how one would work should be commended for having the imagination.Quote:
Originally Posted by a500lbgorilla
An analogy is early physics. Feynman described physics discovery (paraphrasing) as being like determining the rules of chess by only observing one or a few isolated squares of the board during a game. Similarly, to predict the range of possibilities that could exist in the absence of a runaway state, it takes theorizing.
The difference being they were observing the working universe. These guys are guessing at a system and world never to have existed.Quote:
Originally Posted by Renton
Edit: Physicists got to play guess and check. These Anarcho-libertarians play guess and guess again.
Too bad people have already blown their rioting load on some punkass who tried to take a cop's gun away from him to likely murder him just for being asked to stop walking in the fucking road.
GUYS I THINK HE HAS AN AGENDA!Quote:
Originally Posted by Renton
Seriously though, this was an incredibly well constructed argument. I'll check out his other stuff.
Read more from my AMAQuote:
The case they should be going nuts over is the Eric Garner case. They have the guy on video being killed by a cop who was not following the right procedure or anything that would have to do with common sense. The NYC medical examiner's office say that he died from what the cop did. The cop wasn't supposed to do that. It's on video. That's fucking murder. And the cop gets cleared by a grand jury. The difference with this and the Ferguson case is that the evidence clearly proves the NYC choking situation being straight-up murder while the evidence clearly points to the Ferguson situation being justifiable homicide.
Nah, dog. Investigate.
There are tiny pockets of economic freedom and vast amounts of tyranny being demonstrated in current reality, and we can isolate these cases to understand the broader picture. In Thomas Sowell's excellent Basic Economics, its no accident that one of the first things he discusses are rent controlled apartments. It's one of the starkest examples of a price control that demonstrably does great harm to society. He then moves on to discuss all the other types of price controls that have been ubiquitous throughout human history and it turns out they all do very similar harm. The thesis of the book is that all price controls cause net harm to society. And it turns out that nearly everything the government does is in some way or another a price control.Quote:
Originally Posted by a500lbgorilla
I'm rambling a little but my point is that you don't have to jump through many theoretical hoops to arrive at the fact that the state sucks at nearly everything it endeavors to accomplish. Why would law and order be an exception? Honestly I think the burden of proof is on the statist to demonstrate the viability of state law enforcement, and not the other way around.
First, thanks for the name drop. I just snatched up a copy of Basic Economics from amazon.Quote:
Originally Posted by Renton
Second,When you have a bunch of data and information, there are two sorts of conclusions you can make. One inside the data and one outside. Imagine you had some irregular set of data correlating two measurables and you plotted them on an X-Y graph. You could try to do two sorts of guesses: 1) Guessing some combination of the two measurables between other measured values or 2) Guessing some combination of the two measures outside the two extreme measured pairs. I believe your quote is an example of the second sort of reasoning, one that is very dangerous if you want to be right.Quote:
I'm rambling a little but my point is that you don't have to jump through many theoretical hoops to arrive at the fact that the state sucks at nearly everything it endeavors to accomplish. Why would law and order be an exception?
I'd have to read the book to know for sure, but unless you can make a strong case for law and order being a price control, it rather seems like you've got this beautiful hammer of "gov't sucks at so much" and you're trying to nail just about every thing left. Or I would say "Why would law and order be just the same?"
Above and beyond that, I come from a background of skepticism and respect for the scientific method. When I said "physicists got to play guess and check, anarcho's play guess and guess again" I was drawing attention between what are good and bad practices for understanding anything in the world. If you want to do it right: Find something that works (or happens) or make it work, then measure how it works, model your understanding from those measurements, predict something new, verify that something new happens. Anything that deviates from this general formula is just bad analysis to me.
My practice of skepticism gives me a super power when it comes to these discussions on complex topics like this: I know how hard it is to know, so it's very easy to acknowledge when I don't. I have no problem living in the world of I dunno. This is why I can eat up all that you've offered about markets and the benefits of letting them sort themselves out while rejecting the parts that I don't think are up to mustard, like them delivering the objective best results because people will always value things rationally (people are too easily swayed by fluff and packaging for that to be true, imo. The market will deliver great results, only if you consider great in terms of profit and go not one step further.)
Beyond and above that even, I can think of at least one example that demonstrates the value of law and order:
http://i.imgur.com/LFGktTf.png
I'm still wondering how to present Ghenghis Khan as another example. He lived in a world where you were only as strong as you were strong, and with that strength alone he almost conquered Eur-Asia. A free society with guns for hire doesn't change the basic fact that some motherfuckers just know how to ride - just know how to fight, gain followers, wage wars, turn enemies against each other, divide, conquer - and no matter how much you want to imagine that all the private owners will successfully oppose these hooligans, I know that the future is inherently difficult to predict.
And in the two way dispute between Statists and Anarchists, I'll take the third choice. I don't know. But I'll keep on it.Quote:
Honestly I think the burden of proof is on the statist to demonstrate the viability of state law enforcement, and not the other way around.
PS wufwugy, this is why I ignore your parrallels to my thinking being "God of the Gaps", it's more akin to "Gap of the Gaps".
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r5BmtAH0LJs
This guy is closer to a straight republican and I don't agree with all or even a majority of his views, but he makes a great point about the inherent nature of laws.
I want to avoid moving too far the anarchism direction in these discussions because even if its something that I 100% stood behind, which it is not, it's not something I expect to see on any reasonable scale in 50 lifetimes. I bring it up only to underline the point (which I do very much believe) that everything the government does should be looked upon with extreme scrutiny and skepticism in literally every role it plays in society. It's so laughably ridiculous that cigarette vice laws, backed by deadly force as ever, exist in 2014. There is no way for rationality to lead to the conclusion that such a law should exist. But I don't think it is enough to dwell on the periphery of laws like this that are downright ludicrous. I want to talk about laws that are slightly more "reasonable" and take for granted that a tax that increases the price of cigarettes by 1200% is ridiculous. It makes for more interesting discussion and it makes me feel like I'm addressing the core of the issue instead of the periphery of it.
Rilla, the state was born of the need for security in early civilization. Not too many disagree with that. However that doesn't mean that modern society has the same need
There is little data supporting the idea that the state produces prosperity. There is tons of data supporting the idea that markets produce prosperity. It is not much of a leap to claim that the way to create more prosperity is to reduce state power. Check out http://econlog.econlib.org/ . Several highly qualified economists who all support drastic reductions in state power for non-political reasons
Renton, I'm pretty sure I am fully anti-statist. I see no reason to believe that the monopoly on violence is not exactly that. Since true monopolies go against everything we know about what creates prosperity, by logical extension, the state is fundamentally bad. In order to determine the state is valuable, we would need reason to believe there is an inherent value to the monopoly on violence that there isnt to other monopolies
That said, realistically I'm not anti-statist. But if I could vote for a bill that would amend the constitution so that over the next fifty years, the US government's tax revenues gradually reduce to zero, I would. As for all the security problems that would create, I think it's a myth. The incentives would be off the charts for all sorts of varied and capable interests to ensure the fullest of security to replace military and police. I think we would end up seeing a far more positive move in that direction than we can currently get under a tax system. For example, the incentive for states to create full nuclear disarmament is actually pretty meager, but in a market system, that incentive would be extremely high
Wufwugy, the problem with taking an ambiguous stance toward the state is that almost every supposed good that it does dovetails with an evil. I think the most reasonable of leftists would agree that a 1200% tax on cigarettes is a bad law, but they think the welfare state is super necessary and a universal good to society. But if you're going to divorce citizens from the health-deteriorating consequences of their actions, it becomes necessary to promote healthy actions through taxation. And to back up those taxes by deadly force. The state is not a buffet where you can pan around and pick the courses that are appealing to you while eschewing the less appetizing ones. It's more like family dinner with an abusive dad who beats you if you don't eat your green beans.
I'm not sure I understand your point
But I do think the goal is to keep actions as consequential as can be. Society benefits when people who make bad decisions get bad results
good video but isnt that the guy who made some really disingenuous creationism arguments years agoQuote:
Originally Posted by Renton
Hey so who's in the middle of this pseudo-intellectual circlejerk?
I'm saying the whole state package has to come with evil. It's easy to understand that a police state is evil and less easy to understand that a welfare state is evil. Leftists make the fatal (literally) mistake of favoring one while being critical of the other. They're inextricably linked, and failing to understand that disqualifies one from participating in useful political-economic discussion. That is the primary reason why liberals are so much worse than republicans. Both parties believe deeply evil shit, but at least republican ideology is founded in an honest perspective of the world. Kind of ironic since they're also the party of anti-intellectual Christians.
The fallacious beliefs of republicans are a bit more excusable because they're primarily ignorant and uneducated people. They believe what they believe and haven't been taught otherwise. Liberal and socialist doctrine on the other hand pervades every aspect of human education at all levels, especially the post-secondary level. Socialism emerged with fascism between the world wars, then after they blew up the world they fled the ruins of their countries and became professors at the top universities in the world, and spewed their bile to an entire generation of intellectuals. It's unnerving.
Read this yesterday.Quote:
Originally Posted by a500lbgorilla
This person isn't a professor at MIT and has all but admitted to having no credibility on the subject. She has incorrectly defined theorems she calls wrong. If her thesis was right, it wouldn't be that hard for a math graduate like her to make bazillions schooling the unwashed "retards"
At best it looks like she just spent a little bit of time skimming the surface of a handful of ideas and probably reading only just that one economist who spends most of his time pushing a political agenda
I remember having this discussion with Renton in a disaster scenario. Author is right.Quote:
Here is an example:One of the most important topics covered in basic graduate courses in economics
is Pareto efficiency. One is taught the important "theorem" that a free market
will generate a situation which maximizes overall satisfaction.
Of course a basic assumption here is that everyone in this system has
all the information, called "perfect information".
This theorem has a kind of comic genius about it.
I would go as far as to say that when one thinks about it a bit one sees that
the defining characteristic of "real life" is the lack of information and
very unequal distribution of the information that exists.
In the real world that is pretty much all you see, lots of people
with very different information.
The knowledge barrier is the main barrier when it comes to almost every
human endevour.
Why do people start bussiness of the type that they have had experience
working in?
Why are all forms of education so expensive and important?
(even internships these days).
Why does no one have good experiences with home contractors?
"All actors are rational."Quote:
Assume away the most potent ingredient and your going to get a theory thattells you nothing. Build all your understanding on top of this theory and,
I don't even want to imagine...
unfortunately, I don't have to.
Author is right.
The author has strawmanned Paretto efficiency. It does not claim what she says it does.
And there are places where Pareto optimal solutions do happen, where perfect information does occur, like telecom companies bidding on frequency ranges, but the author is still right.
Unstrawmanned. Author still right.Quote:
Originally Posted by wufwugy
What I'm really getting at is if you can show me he's wrong, I want to know. If you want to brush it away with argumentative tricks, then Author is Right.
I'm not trained in econ and the PhDs I read haven't covered this rant. There are a few people with apparent credibility discussing it here
http://www.reddit.com/r/Economics/co..._on_economics/
This is an example of an expert in one field thinking she is an expert in unrelated ones
This guy gets it. Now if he would only get why she's raising these concerns.Quote:
It appears the math professor couldn't handle the fact that in economics:
We have models, wherein all the rules and mechanisms are clearly defined;
We have the real world, where it's a lot harder to boil things down to a few transparent mechanisms.
We use the former to clarify our thinking about the latter.
Models are fully-articulated artificial economies where the researcher has full control over the preferences, the production functions, and the trading arrangements. We then figure out properties of those model economies, identify key transmission mechanisms, and poke them to see how they react.
Then we reason by analogy to the real world.
And if you think the assumptions don't reflect the real world along some first-order dimension, you build a competing model where you have different trading arrangements, or different utility functions, or different production functions, or whatever. Then you see how far from the benchmark your model takes you.
What concerns? She's not raising any concerns. She has no credibility and has not demonstrated any reason to give her any.Quote:
Originally Posted by a500lbgorilla
If I dilly-dallied in introductory physics then left and assumed I fully understood physics, I could point out all the ways in which physics is "wrong", yet I would be the one who is wrong
I'm a little surprised that you think she has anything important to say. She doesn't. She admits she has no credibility, blatantly strawmans, and produces a shitty rant calling people retards. I have a hard time imagining she looks like anything other than a squawking child to serious economists
Argumentative tricks it is, I see.
Why do we use Newtonian Mechanics but we don't use luminiferous aether mechanics? Because when we build models in physics, they prove themselves by fire. When you build models in economics, well, there's some room to be philosophical about them.Quote:
Some people are uncomfortable when there is information missing from their systems and know that it will never be available. Economics is not "perfect" like true math because it deals with human emotions and irrationality. Additionally, the theories that we learn are idealistic and do not usually have perfect application or representation in the real world. OC goes on to say we are not as bright as physicists, but that branch of science has not been able to come to agreement on their fundamental laws either.OC is correct that many theories are impractical and inaccurate in the real world. Show me a true prefect competition and I will buy you lunch. Bitcoin? There is imperfect information and barriers to entry.
The beauty of economics is that without bringing a bit of philosophy into the equation you will have difficulty understanding it. Divergence from theory leaves room to be surprised and to learn new things about the way humans interact. The horror of economics is that ignorant people can push their political agenda by insisting that it is supported by economics. All you need is one person to write an article and if an unscrupulous person chooses they can cite it to back up fiscal policy.
On a related note I would guess that within 20 years our ability to analyze big data in realtime will produce much more accurate economic models and stop a lot of that sort of shenanigans.
>Economics is not "perfect" like true math because it deals with human emotions and irrationality.
I thought she was saying almost the opposite: That economics is lacking because it mostly deals with (too) simplistic models of human behavior.
Sumner's most recent post is pretty relevant to that view, actually
http://www.themoneyillusion.com/?p=28248
People who have little understanding of economics love having an opinion on it (myself included). This, along with the field having high levels of political relevance, is probably why people hold it to entirely different standards than other fields.
As I delve into material written by the most credible people in the field, I find almost everything the public likes to think about economics is false. It's as if it's two different worlds.
Physicists and Economists don't see eye to eye. When you're trained in one, you don't understand the other well enough to compare. But as I've been roughly trained in physics, there's a secure beauty in the things you know and understand. You can always check yourself against reality if ever you're worried. There's always a sanity check. Even when it returns an insane answer, you can be sane in accepting it.
With economics, it seems that the demand for an answer well out-strips our ability to have one. And so you have a lot of worthwhile information, but none of it built upon a bedrock comparable to physics.
Hold physics to the same standard as everybody holds economics, and we'll start talking about how bad physicists are at understanding/predicting earthquakes. We'll also find the tons of factors with utmost levels of certainty that nobody talks aboutQuote:
Originally Posted by a500lbgorilla
You're suggesting economics is conjecture. It only appears to be conjecture since the only stuff anybody other than its most credible ever seem to discuss in public discourse is conjecture, all the while ignoring key elements of the known
Doesn't it strike you as odd that people who have absolutely no business having an opinion on economics are the crowd that claims its lack of veracity? If we did this with physics, we'd get laughed out of the building. Yet for some reason it's super popular to not understand economics yet deride it
http://i.imgur.com/uB7ougJ.gif
Yes, let's hold Physics to the same standard as Economics lol
Let'sQuote:
Originally Posted by a500lbgorilla
Going to the moon is about a million times an easier problem to solve than the problems the average person complains economists haven't solved
If you tried to claim something in physics lacked veracity, you would be making that claim against reality itself. You could go and verify if you were right or wrong independent of any speaker. Economics should be on the same plane as that.Quote:
Originally Posted by wufwugy
So, how do you get to the moon? I'd bet if you learned how it's done, you'd see why economic explanations are no where near as robust as physical ones.Quote:
Originally Posted by wufwugy
This just got lame.
Economics is on the same plane, it's just not treated by most not in the profession as such.Quote:
Originally Posted by a500lbgorilla
Absorb the point Sumner makes in the post I linked. He's comparing apples to apples. What people complain about with economics is really just the lack of a unified theory of macroeconomics. The complexity of such would be on the level of, say, a unified theory of neuro-physics of the brain. People don't get mad at mathematicians for "so poorly" understanding their field that they haven't created mathematical models of the ultra complex brain, yet people DO get mad at economists for not doing the same of an equally difficult task in economies of society.
When we discuss physics, we tend to discuss things that are already known. But when we discuss economics, we almost never discuss the known. In doing it this way, it has given people license to believe that economics is full of unknowns unlike other fields. That isn't the case, it's just that nobody wants to hear about it. The only thing people want from economics is that grand unified theory of complexity far beyond any other field has solved
Their robustness is proportional to complexity, or at least basically so. Economics has super robust math at its base. The issues come when trying to develop social theories, which is a far more difficult task than going to the moon. There is a stark difference between something like flying and something like predicting weather. Nobody calls bullshit on physicists because of how bad they are predicting weather, yet many call bullshit on economists because of how bad they are at predicting capital changes.Quote:
Originally Posted by a500lbgorilla
I think if you read Sumner for a while, you might lighten your view. He was the first economist I read where I realized there is a huge difference between the perception of economics and actual economics. Academics say much different things than journalists and politicians say they say
That would be funny if most first year physics students didn't understand economics on a much deeper level than most economic students.
To the point where I know people with 1sts in economics who know very little about economics in the sense that you mean and very much about the regulations of the EU.
I'm not sure how much I would disagree with that. Physics is much more difficult subject matter (as far as what is taught and what is expected of the students). Most who go into physics are generally competent in a variety of other fields, at least as far as intro is concerned. But lots of econ students are those whose skills are at a general arts level and econ would be a challenge to them
Regardless, the comparison isn't student/student, but unqualified/qualified. The comic is deriding the common scenario where some people who are unqualified seem to think they have better understanding of a field than the consensus of PhDs in the field. "Rationality" is a great example because the mistake made is not unlike how creationists deride theories because they don't know the difference between colloquial theories and scientific theories. It's like how in intro chemistry, a faulty model of electron behavior in atoms is taught, but it is corrected at more advanced stages of education. The consensus among chemistry educators seems to be that they need to teach the incorrect model first. Frankly I think this sort of thing exists in every field, and for good reason. The comic is pointing out how people like to take those intro ideas and run with them as if they are expert level
Wuf I get the joke, it's a joke which presides in most fields, especially those where you can take an authority pose on any subject.
http://xkcd.com/263/
I actually think it becomes a funnier joke when it's based on the fact that it's at the fault of economics for not being able to present itself properly as a subject matter. For example most (all) good universities in the UK at least much prefer an A in maths and require no knowledge of economics prior, probably says a lot about economics prior to this in schools. Then when you do go and learn about economics very little is actually taught around the system of this is the mathematical system, these are the models we make based upon those assumptions.
That's true. The economist I read the most claims one of the biggest problems in the field is bad messaging. Also that macro shouldn't even be taught until graduate level because of how counterintuitive it is
Alright.
The point: It is very difficult to mock up an economy and run trial.
Being able to construct an experiment to isolate and study a phenomenon is important to calibrating your understanding.
If you can't calibrate your understanding, it's very easy to be wrong.
On models:
A model to me is a tool that takes as Ins some translated aspect of reality and gives as Outs some other retranslated aspect of reality. So in Newtonian mechanics you can take a situation like pushing a block along an incline, translate this situation into the model of Newtonian mechanics with your free body diagrams, friction coefficients, masses, and governing equations and calculate the expected acceleration of the block, then take this calculation and translate it back into reality by watching the block move as expected.
Or a good visualization of a model would be this:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NAsM30MAHLg
You can take some signal of reality, translate it into the model, use the model to crunch through, then take the result and translate it back to reality.
Models are built upon assumptions. They require a set of things to be true to allow for other things to be true. The seminal example of this is Euclidean Geometry which requires the following things to be true:
1. A straight line segment can be drawn joining any two points.
2. Any straight line segment can be extended indefinitely in a straight line.
3. Given any straight line segment, a circle can be drawn having the segment as radius and one endpoint as center.
4. All right angles are congruent.
5. If two lines are drawn which intersect a third in such a way that the sum of the inner angles on one side is less than two right angles, then the two lines inevitably must intersect each other on that side if extended far enough. i.e. The parallel postulate.
Among a whole pile of other definitions and things. Given these as true, you can demonstrate other more complex truths like Pythagorean's theorem.
The interesting case study here is the fifth assumption - the parallel postulate. For the longest time people struggled with trying to show that it could be proved as a part of the other four assumptions. Eventually, some people realized that you could change the fifth assumption and create totally valid non-Euclidean models. Worlds where the sum of the interior angle of triangles weren't 180 degrees and all sorts of other stuff. The point here is that your assumptions need to hug tightly to reality or else your model isn't guessing at what is or will be.
In fact, I know you would love looking into Godel's proof which shows that no model can describe all the truth of reality. My personal take from that whole rabbit hole is that the only true description of reality is reality itself. Everything else is translating the answer key of reality into human thought with loss in translation. Meaning every model will somehow be wrong. Like Bohr's model with big enough atoms, or Newtonian Mechanics at high enough velocity.
On why the people that come from the hard science side don't like economics:
Physics teaches a few life lessons, among them that your intuition is crap. I remember in physics class when I was asked what path a ball tied to a string rotating on a table top would take if the string were cut. I imagined it flying away by sort of loose spiral outward, a curved path barely following the old circle, borrowing from my understanding of throwing a ball and how it bent combined with the spinning pattern of a ball held on a string. Of course the answer is that it moves tangential to the curve in a straight line once tension is lost and this can be demonstrated. And upon demonstration, I knew that my shit needed to be torn down and rebuilt before this new understanding. I also remember when I was introduced to space stretching out, time slowing down, and all the other relative fun of Einstein, thinking it was total bullshit. Of course, once you understand how the understanding was reached and verified, fuck what you think you know, this is what you need to know.
The reason physics can teach these life lessons is because the models used are tightly coupled to reality. They are derived from highly engineered experimental set ups used to illuminate the hidden description of physical interaction. Thermodynamics being built upon a working engine. Newtonian Mechanics being built upon observations of springs, pulleys, pendulums, planets. They are from experimental sciences.
Then you might wander into engineering and learn a new lesson - the art of taking a complex problem, breaking it up into simpler problems, solving those simpler problems and rebuilding it all into a complex solution. Like how Quantum Mechanics can use models for standing waves on a string coupled with experimental observation to describe the nature of light and electrons.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r2GI...otation_234739
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L9_9y3PMGTA
Not all of robust modeling of the physical world is so neat and beautiful, mind you. Like how you can use experimental gas and mechanical laws to describe the lift and drag on an airplane but you still need to use fudge factor coefficients to fit real data. The way air interacts with an aeroplane is a very complicated, rapidly changing matter that requires computational methods like Computational Fluid Dynamics and Finite Element Analysis to vet out. Where broad solutions to simple piecemeal problems are integrated to solve for a complex whole. The reason engineers can trust these calculations is because they are built upon the bedrock of old, well-worn experimental models. And plus, they use factors of safety and verify their work through testing.
Then you might come across an economist who says, hey listen: you ever wonder why it is that neighborhoods become homogeneous? Well, I've got a model to explain it. Suppose that people only seek to live in neighborhoods that are 70% like themselves, not terribly racists or classists or culturists or in-group-ist, reasonable really, well still look at what happens:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dnffIS2EJ30
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Kiz-avI0gUc
http://www.businessinsider.com/most-...ps-2013-4?op=1
How do we know that this is the explanation for our segregated cities? Well, we don't. It just really looks like it is.
And here is where my problem is. So many life lessons, so many important insights into robust analysis, so much to have learned, and now you're going to pull this bullshit on me? In Carl Sagan's Cosmos he has a brilliant scene where he shows a star map with lines drawn connecting a constellation. He talks about how people recognized the given star map from an abduction. Then he points out that it's not the stars they recognize, but the pattern forced ontop of them. He does this by imposing a new constellation on the same stars, and it's immediately apparent that they don't match. How do we know that Schelling's model isn't along these same phenomenal lines?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g4CkXerRDps
Time = 5m or somewhere around there, just watch the whole series from episode 1.
You can't Know. You can't know like you would with a model derived from an experimental science. You don't have an experiment isolating how people act and interact. You can't recraft your intuition based on this, all you can say is that if you ever encounter a situation where the atomic elements try to self-align under these beliefs, you knowish how it'll end up. Models like this are great for playing guessing games. You don't know much, but if you pay careful attention to what you know and what the consequences of those knows are, you can make a better guess than the next guy. If you put your beliefs through the rigors of rational thinking, you'll come out with a pretty good guessing mechanism - a pretty good model. But you won't Know.
And this is my problem with Economics. I can search through other areas of study and see the robustness of the experimental method shine through. Watson and Crick's uncovering of DNA; Cajal's histology of neuro-anatomy is a blockbuster of proper scientific reasoning. Darwin's on the Origin of Species, just a slam dunk. But Economics is always there trying to sell me some snake oil - look how much it's like those others, you'll never know the difference! Economists will build models and try to tweak the models to observation of complex interactions, and this is the mistake. You should find a way to make clear observation of simple interactions, and then model it, then verify the model by observing its predictions. Like behavioral economists.
If you're going to tell me that people act rationally, you've got to show me the experiment(s) and observations which lead to that conclusion. Just as if I were going to tell you that a force is proportional to a mass's acceleration, forces occur in pairs, and momentum is proportional to a mass's velocity and changes only with an external force, I would show you any number of set ups to demonstrate.
Summation of the point: When building a model, use the experimental method to calibrate it to reality.
Do you have examples of behavioral economics doing this?
Thinking Fast and Slow by Daniel Kahneman.
I still haven't gotten past the first ten pages of A Renegade History of the United States. Unlikely I'll read any new non-fiction any time soon
Regardless, I think the comparison is apples and oranges. Social sciences can't be modeled like that due to our level of tech and the human variable. Physics would fare no better with the same problems.
Clearly economic modeling works. If it didn't, we'd all still be farmers and the Fed couldn't exist. The perfect shouldn't be the enemy of the good. It appears to me that your frustration with economics is it's not perfect. My frustration is that's throwing the baby out with the bathwater by not utilizing the best information we have
Rilla I think your problem is that you believe that basic economic principles do not work (or at least, aren't always beneficial to society) because of the lack of perfect information when people transact. But there's nothing to say that every participant in trade need be rational or have perfect information for economic benefit to occur. Sowell's definition of economics (which he ripped from others no doubt) is the study of scarce resources which have alternative uses. Information is a scarce resource that has alternative uses, one of the scarcest and most useful resources there is. Free trade between individuals does a pretty good job of efficiently distributing scarce resources in an economy, and one of the ways it does this is by propagating information about those resources to others within the economy. When someone in an economic transaction gets "duped" out of some of his resources due to a lack of knowledge, those resources are displaced to people who have a clearer view of the true value of the resource, and society benefits greatly from this.
If a farmer is growing peas on his land, oblivious to the fact that his land is sitting on a couple of cubic miles of oil, he is clearly making very poor use of the land. If an oil speculator has the expertise to know that there's a high probability that this parcel of land is rich in oil, he has every right to offer to buy the man's land. When he does so it is his responsibility to get the lowest possible price just like its the farmer's responsibility to get the highest possible price. When the oil man exploits this asymmetry of information, the rest of us gain when the price of oil goes down.
No Renton. My problem is that I understand the scientific method and won't settle for anything less. Economists want to understand the economy, can't apply the principles, and so need to take on faith they're getting it right.
When someone says two massive bodies will attract each other in space, and you ask how they know that, they'll always be able to walk you back to some experiment that shows that's how reality is. You don't have to trust them, you just have to trust their methods and reality.
When someone says two people engaging in a trade benefits both sides, and you ask how they know that, they'll tell you to close your eyes and imagine and walk you through a scenario. You have to trust that your imagination is doing it right and their scenario is accurate to how things really are.
The other side of Scientific Skepticism is understanding how easy it is for your own brain to get things wrong and really not have the slightest sense about it. That whole can of worms is why it's so important to use the scientific method. Because, at heart, it can show you the answer independent of anyone's beliefs or opinions or needs or psychological hang ups or blind spots.
When you say things like the free market is pretty good at netting results that are a benefit to society, it fires off so many alarm bells to me. I'm not going to trust the conclusions and unverified models of others. Reality is the way it is and that's what I want to know about.
"An economic model is a simplified description of reality, designed to yield hypotheses about economic behavior that can be tested. An important feature of an economic model is that it is necessarily subjective in design because there are no objective measures of economic outcomes. Different economists will make different judgments about what is needed to explain their interpretations of reality."
http://www.imf.org/external/pubs/ft/fandd/2011/06/basics.htm
Economics today is prob never going to do it for me.
But this is why I like Behavioral Economists so much. Why bother with this noise when we can try to understand people and how they act/decide and build up from there? Don't tell people what they're doing when they make a choice, understand how they make a choice instead.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Behavioral_economics
So cool.
Scientific method and objectivism are relevant in economics. You're comparing two different things. In physics, it's EASY to conduct experiments. In economics, it's really really really really really hard.
They are both sciences. There is no fundamental difference between experimental and social sciences. There is only an optical and functional difference since one is about a million times harder than the other to conduct experiments. If physics had as many hard to define variables as economics, physicists would look like economists.
It sounds like you're saying that because you think economics is hard, it's not worthwhile
If you say so, wuf.
Several economists are currently running an experiment on a theory that normalizes nominal economies
Talk about it.
The theory is about a nominal GDP futures market. ipredict is the main vehicle for the experiment, but I think there are multiple markets. Here's Sumner's first post on it. IIRC Gabe Newell is the chief donor
http://www.themoneyillusion.com/?p=27695
I haven't kept up much with it since it's way too technical for me. The theory is that NGDP level targeting by central banks is a tool that would successfully avoid most (maybe all, I don't know) recessions not caused by real shocks. It would effectively eliminate monetary supply shocks from the equation, which are the primary causes of most recessions. A futures market is thought to maintain the accuracy and integrity of an NGDP target. I don't know the parameters or goals of this experiment, but the purpose is to demonstrate to the Federal Reserve that an NGDP futures market is how they should conduct monetary policy. If it fails, the theory is wrong
Here's the site
https://www.ipredict.co.nz/
I'm pretty sure this is set up so that you're not using your own money so as to let US citizens not be subject to gambling restrictions. Sumner wanted to set it up in the US ofc, but he claims there is no way they could have gotten through the regulatory nightmare that is US financial law. How ironic it would be if the project was a success and the Fed formalized NGDP level targeting, yet that couldn't have happened if US laws were the only laws on the books
It sounds cool. Have a lot of people gamble on guessing the future instead of a couple academics doing it.
Not science though.
Since you play at the blog post level. Here.
http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2014-1...ocial-sciences
Voluntary trade benefits both sides because otherwise the trade wouldn't occur. The proof that it benefits both sides is the fact that the value of anything is individually subjective. There is no such thing as objective value. Every resource has a different worth in the hands of different owners. If I distribute a bunch of bouncy rubber balls of different colors to a kindergarten class, and then allow them to trade with one another, trade will almost certainly occur and everyone who trades will increase his/her value. More people will be able to have a preferred color than if I had prohibited trade to occur.Quote:
Originally Posted by a500lbgorilla
All economic growth that occurs is because of this very simple theory that voluntary trade results in mutual benefit. There's nothing imaginary or abstract about it. Someone with a large quantity of raw cocaine doesn't try to sell it to just anybody, he looks for a distributor. He wants to sell the cocaine preferably in one transaction for minimal risk, and thus is willing to accept far less than the retail value of it. A distributor will pay this price because, in his hands, the cocaine is worth far more. After all, he has the distribution network and has a system in place that will allow him to mitigate the risk that the wholesaler was trying to avoid. He's looking for dealers who can sell small quantities of the cocaine, and is willing to sell for significantly less than retail. Dealers at the local level are willing to accept the risk, which is now more minor because the quantity is greatly reduced, and are willing to do the legwork involved in selling the cocaine 1 gram at a time. As before, the resource is worth more in the hands of a dealer than in the hands of a distributor. The same resource has greatly different per capita values in the hands of different people all along the supply chain.
You've never made a trade you regretted?
Sorry guys, but I'm officially bowing out. You can have your social sciences. I'm not buying it.
Economics doesn't deny this. Economics tries to explain how this -- and everything else -- relates to a system of production and tradeQuote:
Originally Posted by a500lbgorilla
If you don't like social sciences, then cool. Just keep in mind that they're just an extreme extension of physics (really, just math, as is everything). Also if you ever demonstrate something that doesn't work, you're doing science