Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Why Are Economists Giving Piketty the Cold Shoulder? (2017)

bostonreview.net

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

111–120 of 143 posts

Re: Why Are Economists Giving Piketty the Cold Shoulder? (2017)

#111

Post by taffer »

Gibbon1 wrote: post #96
closeparen wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The physics and math communities get plenty agitated at ludicrous pop-sci and Hollywood depictions, cranks who think they are oppressed geniuses with important answers, etc. Approach just about anyone with arrogance and contempt for the methods and body of knowledge they spend their life on, and they won’t be happy about it.

Difference between annoyed/amused/slight despondency and narcissistic rage. It's kinda of like this, a mechanical engineer doesn't feel threatened by some guy selling a magnetic doohickey you put in series with your cars fuel line to increase MPG. He just thinks it's stupid. He's not mad though. Economists get angry.

And some physicians get mad at homeopaths. So what?

Re: Why Are Economists Giving Piketty the Cold Shoulder? (2017)

#112

Post by mcguire »

closeparen wrote: post #89
mcguire wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To an extent, I suspect you're right. I further suspect that economists, as a field, will continue to claim that their models, metrics, theories, and policy advice are good, while complaining about the inexplicable rise of populism, right up until somebody sets up a guillotine in front of Goldman-Sachs. (Populism is easy to explain: the peasants are revolting.)

We’ve actually had a taste of a world without Goldman Sachs and its ilk performing their functions: the credit freeze right after the crash. Was that better?

Oh, hell no! :-)

On the other hand, there's a difference between the ilk performing their functions and the tail wagging the dog.

(I specifically picked on GS because this weird sense I have that US economic policy has been outsourced to Goldman-Sachs for several decades.)

Re: Why Are Economists Giving Piketty the Cold Shoulder? (2017)

#113

Post by mcguire »

geezerjay wrote: post #45
mcguire wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To an extent, I suspect you're right. I further suspect that economists, as a field, will continue to claim that their models, metrics, theories, and policy advice are good, while complaining about the inexplicable rise of populism, right up until somebody sets up a guillotine in front of Goldman-Sachs. (Populism is easy to explain: the peasants are revolting.)

Populism is a major problem, and one which is based on unscrupulous politicians taking advantage of the ignorance and prejudice while promissing unrealisting and outright impossible solutions to problems that they missrepresent and even invent. And that has absolutely zero to do with science in general and economic models in particular. Time and again we see populist politicians fanning up the masses with anti-capita…

It is neither ignorant nor prejudiced to notice that your standard of living, and that of your children, have been rather stagnant in recent memory.

Re: Why Are Economists Giving Piketty the Cold Shoulder? (2017)

#114

Post by mcguire »

geezerjay wrote: post #68
bigbaguette wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thing is populists tactics wouldn't get as much traction if the prejudice was not as bad, or worsening in the first place. Populism starts as a natural consequence of misery and lack of education, then becomes a cause that keeps reinforcing itself until the guillotine moment. Solving the populism issue means tackling the root issues it feeds from first.

> Thing is populists tactics wouldn't get as much traction if the prejudice was not as bad, or worsening in the first place. The problem is that prejudice is also invented and disseminated by these unscrupulous politicians with their populist rhetoric. We see that in any extreme cormer of the political spectrum, whether its anti-capitalist socialists or racial supremacists. History is packed with examples where total…

Which of the anti-capitalist socialist, racial supremacists, or totalitarians are responsible for the recent drops in life expectancy in the US, out of curiosity?

https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/us-life-expectancy...

Re: Why Are Economists Giving Piketty the Cold Shoulder? (2017)

#115

Post by geezerjay »

luckydata wrote: post #75
geezerjay wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is not an argument from authority. It's a statement of fact that both authors have published a very long body of work including very high-value contributions to science, and they are not suddenly incompetent idiots just because they've published a paper that a random guy on the interned perceives as being politically inconvenient. And the OP quite literally argued the scientists who authored the paper should be fo…

They are not idiots, just highly motivated political operators using papers full of mistakes to make a point. That's the part that should have gotten them fired but since you agree with their goals then you don't take issue with that.

> They are not idiots, just highly motivated political operators using papers full of mistakes to make a point.

That's a repeat of the old tired strawman that tries to avoid discussing the facts and the data by depicting any academic who authors an inconvenient paper as being a political agent involved in some widespread anti-socialist conspiracy.

Meanwhile, let's not forget that the people attacking the Roggof&Reinhart paper are somehow criticizing the fact that highly indebted states experience lower growth rates, as if either increasing sovereign debt or siphoning cash from the budget to service debt has no impact on the nation's finances.

Re: Why Are Economists Giving Piketty the Cold Shoulder? (2017)

#116

Post by taffer »

pytester wrote: post #87
Gibbon1 wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think you'd agree with me that the problems with post WWII "social science", "political science", "psychology", "architecture" are precisely that they're trying to ape the physical sciences and not just be art. And this is utterly true of Economics more than anything. And actually while a lot of arts have been pulling themselves back from that rat hole economics just keeps digging deeper.

The problem with economics is the money riding on it. If one day the consensus becomes "raising the minimum wage by $5 only impacts profit; it doesn't impact employment" then a lot of very rich people stand to lose a lot of money as it becomes more politically palatable. Economics is the most highly paid soft science for a reason. Climate science has the same issue but fortunately they have managed to resist the corr…

> The problem with economics is the money riding on it. If one day the consensus becomes "raising the minimum wage by $5 only impacts profit; it doesn't impact employment" then a lot of very rich people stand to lose a lot of money as it becomes more politically palatable.

Reality is a bit more nuanced than you depict it [1][2].

> Climate science has the same issue but fortunately they have managed to resist the corrupting influence of money.

So scientists are more or less corrupt, depending on how much you think they agree with you?

[1]http://www.igmchicago.org/surveys/minimum-wage

[2]http://www.igmchicago.org/surveys/15-minimum-wage

Re: Why Are Economists Giving Piketty the Cold Shoulder? (2017)

#117

Post by ericd »

mcguire wrote: post #31
burlesona wrote: post #25

This bit really struck me: “Matthew Rognlie—then a doctoral student, now an assistant professor at Northwestern—took up that line in even greater detail in an article that eventually appeared in the Brookings Papers on Economic Activity, to which he added that the rising capital-to-income ratio in Piketty’s data is disproportionately the result of the price appreciation of certain scarce stores of wealth, primarily h…

I have some problems with that same quote. The "disproportionate price appreciation of housing and the land it sits on" seems to me to be primarily a factor only in some (maybe most) large cities; outside those cities, price appreciation, perhaps excessive price appreciation, has occurred, but it's nothing like that in those few cities. My feeling is that, sure, the effect of real estate prices are large in real term…

No, high rents in SF aren’t the fault of Venture Capital, except to the extent that VC has helped the economy boom in SF. That’s one factor, but the core problem is that we can’t build enough inventory to match demand to live in the city, largely due to artificial restrictions.

Re: Why Are Economists Giving Piketty the Cold Shoulder? (2017)

#118

Post by darksaints »

sgift wrote: post #69
TheTrotters wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But then you have to ask yourself why this surge in demand for real estate in urban areas hasn't been met by a corresponding surge in supply? Why aren't developers building new apartment complexes as fast as they can to cash in? The answer is primary that regulation by local governments prevents them from doing that thereby keeping real estate prices high.

Space is limited, demand is not. Physical reality trumps economic wish-thinking every time. Most of the time, the lack of space is the root problem, not some governmental boogeyman.

Saying that we have a lack of space in San Francisco (or any American city) is like closing your eyes and saying the sun doesn't exist anymore. It's a deliberate nonsensical denial of reality. In order to say such absurd nonsense, you have to pretend that denser cities do not exist.

Re: Why Are Economists Giving Piketty the Cold Shoulder? (2017)

#119

Post by taffer »

mcguire wrote: post #113
geezerjay wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Populism is a major problem, and one which is based on unscrupulous politicians taking advantage of the ignorance and prejudice while promissing unrealisting and outright impossible solutions to problems that they missrepresent and even invent. And that has absolutely zero to do with science in general and economic models in particular. Time and again we see populist politicians fanning up the masses with anti-capita…

It is neither ignorant nor prejudiced to notice that your standard of living, and that of your children, have been rather stagnant in recent memory.

The ignorant part is blaming Mexicans, Chinese or cyclists when reality is much more complicated than that. Building a wall won't improve healthcare, and insulting diplomatic partners won't return manufacturing jobs.

Re: Why Are Economists Giving Piketty the Cold Shoulder? (2017)

#120

Post by mcguire »

darksaints wrote: post #118
sgift wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Space is limited, demand is not. Physical reality trumps economic wish-thinking every time. Most of the time, the lack of space is the root problem, not some governmental boogeyman.

Saying that we have a lack of space in San Francisco (or any American city) is like closing your eyes and saying the sun doesn't exist anymore. It's a deliberate nonsensical denial of reality. In order to say such absurd nonsense, you have to pretend that denser cities do not exist.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_United_States_cities_b...

If you ignore "those cities not a part of a larger city's metropolitan area," it's (6,000/km^2) between New York City (10,000/km^2) and Boston (5,000/km^2). It's approximately the same density as Queens.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_European_Union_cities_...

It's much less than Paris (21,000/km^2), Athens, Barcelona, and a bunch of other European cities. More than Dublin (5,000/km^2), if that helps.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_cities_by_population_d...

Got nothing on Manilla, Mumbai (holy shit, Mumbai!), or Kolkatta.

But what the hell's up with Guttenberg, NJ?

Post reply on HN