61–70 of 223 posts
This is seen even in very technical fields, such as physics. As the saying goes in poker, if you are in academia and can't spot this person, then it's probably you. It's also a slightly cynical take on imposter's syndrome, in a way.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I came to the same realization, but it was unnecessarily difficult to see through all of the snark. If all parties had simply focused on the salient points of disgreement rather than snarking at each other, it could have been cleared up much more quickly. The GP is right; all sides should be embarrassed.
Sorry but you’re completely wrong. If an analysis is making a reasonable effort to use the best or even some sort of relevant methodology in the field maybe. There is an entire field built around the learnings and failures of previous work that informs how we do things now. In this circumstance the economist came in with no understanding or desire to understand any of that and through some random excel function at th…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
The incentives are also out of alignment - politicians have an enormous incentive to promote economic theories that let them pork barrel to constituents. And a slight incentive to favour theories that increase government control of industry. Major financial players have incentives to push theories that favour wealth accumulation to big players. I note with some cynicism that there has been no apparent push by economi…
> a slight incentive to favour theories that increase government control of industry I think you have this the wrong way around. Mainstream economic theory (the neo-liberal kind) actually leads to the control of government by private capital. What you will see coming out of the top schools (especially Chicago) but many others too is theory that pushes for de-regulation, privatization, free flow of capital, laissez-fa…
That's a tautological and zero-sum way to look at it
So much of everything is about connections and reputation. Tech in particular holds up a guise that people are chosen and ascend because they are “good”, meaning, they are good at what they do. That’s part of it, but it’s an insufficient part, and you can do pretty well in a career being solidly average at what you do. The real currency in my experience is one thing - relationships. Do I think this person likes, resp…
Yes, this was the opinion I came here to post, certainly my own profession of law is like this, at least where I practice in Toronto Canada but I can't imagine other places being much different. I think one advantage of computers is that what you produce at the end has to work - and if the code doesn't work or you don't know what you're doing, you're quickly exposed as a fraud. This is not the case in other fields li…
Is this actually true? You can bullshit coding...
It's not clear what technical content this post has. A cubic polynomial vs time would be a terrible idea, but the dashed and/or dotted red line (that people seem upset about) is obviously not a cubic polynomial vs time. At that point I run out of guesses about exactly what's being said by anybody.
> A cubic polynomial vs time would be a terrible idea, but the dashed and/or dotted red line (that people seem upset about) is obviously not a cubic polynomial vs time. What? The chart's creator said it was a cubic polynomial. Mr. Hassett said he had employed ‘just a canned function in Excel, a cubic polynomial.’” https://www.vox.com/2020/5/8/21250641/kevin-hassett-cubic-mo...
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I came to the same realization, but it was unnecessarily difficult to see through all of the snark. If all parties had simply focused on the salient points of disgreement rather than snarking at each other, it could have been cleared up much more quickly. The GP is right; all sides should be embarrassed.
It would not have "been cleared up", because the CEA didn't make an honest mistake, it was a deliberate attempt to seed disinformation in order to support the President's political agenda.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
The incentives are also out of alignment - politicians have an enormous incentive to promote economic theories that let them pork barrel to constituents. And a slight incentive to favour theories that increase government control of industry. Major financial players have incentives to push theories that favour wealth accumulation to big players. I note with some cynicism that there has been no apparent push by economi…
> I suspect pervasive co-op style businesses combined with a reasonably permissive lending environment would be absolute economic powerhouses. Based on what? The data seems to point in the opposite direction: successful, innovative businesses are driven by singular leadership. Apple since Steve Jobs died has not only lost much of its innovative spark, but quality has plummeted. See also Tesla, Amazon, etc. I don't li…
Hrm, I think it depends on what they meant by co-op style (as in the previous sentence they say "primarily worker owned"). I agree singular leadership and direction is important, but that's not necessarily at odds with primarily worker owned, even if it's at odds with some versions of worker owned.
An example of a company that has multiple CEOs that have driven it to success in different times and in slightly different contexts would by Microsoft. Originally helmed by Gates in a manner somewhat similar to Jobs and Musk, it's now helmed by Nadella to great success. I would count that due to Nadella having a singular vision, and buy in from the company so he can achieve that. I'm not sure being worker owned (other than it being kind of hard to keep it that way once you get large enough...) would change that as long as he still had the confidence of the board (which in that case would be a council of workers I guess?).
Another way to think of this might be the (traditional) American auto industry. While not worker owned, as I understand it the unions have quite a lot of power (including board seats), and that might be seen as somewhat of a proxy for large successful (significantly) worker owned companies, and those have gone through periods of great success at times as well.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> a slight incentive to favour theories that increase government control of industry I think you have this the wrong way around. Mainstream economic theory (the neo-liberal kind) actually leads to the control of government by private capital. What you will see coming out of the top schools (especially Chicago) but many others too is theory that pushes for de-regulation, privatization, free flow of capital, laissez-fa…
> MMT especially is not at all a mainstream theory. AFAICT, the descriptive aspects of MMT are widely accepted, if deemphasized in prescriptive contexts, aspects of mainstream economic theory (not just [neo-]Keynesian, but across essentially the whole spectrum of descriptive economics.) The prescriptions that MMT adherents make based on those descriptive aspects are out of line with mainstream prescriptions, which te…
Take the very basic thing that you mention at the end, which should be absolutely non-controversial: the US government cannot be forced into default.
If your prescriptions are just going to ignore that fact, then have you truly accepted it? I'd argue that no, you really haven't.
(That doesn't mean you'd have to follow the prescriptions of MMTers necessarily, e.g. the Job Guarantee is certainly not a logically necessary conclusion of the fact that a sovereign government cannot go bankrupt. But your whole framing around government spending and revenue really does need to be centered around this observation, or you're simply bound to fall into fuzzy and incorrect thinking all the time.)
Earlier quoted context omitted.
The incentives are also out of alignment - politicians have an enormous incentive to promote economic theories that let them pork barrel to constituents. And a slight incentive to favour theories that increase government control of industry. Major financial players have incentives to push theories that favour wealth accumulation to big players. I note with some cynicism that there has been no apparent push by economi…
> I suspect pervasive co-op style businesses combined with a reasonably permissive lending environment would be absolute economic powerhouses. Based on what? The data seems to point in the opposite direction: successful, innovative businesses are driven by singular leadership. Apple since Steve Jobs died has not only lost much of its innovative spark, but quality has plummeted. See also Tesla, Amazon, etc. I don't li…
Your evidence doesn't quite say what you think it does; you are talking about day-to-day management, I'm talking about ownership structure and how day-to-day management gets appointed/fired.
But no specific evidence, just first principles reasoning. It is hard to see why it would do badly.
[0] https://www.businessinsider.com.au/steve-jobs-original-apple...
It's not clear what technical content this post has. A cubic polynomial vs time would be a terrible idea, but the dashed and/or dotted red line (that people seem upset about) is obviously not a cubic polynomial vs time. At that point I run out of guesses about exactly what's being said by anybody.
Um, yes. The statistical community has not been doing well with the coronavirus epidemic. Nobody's models seem to be predicting well. Nor is the source data for anything but deaths very good. This matters, because the current plan US plan seems to be "open things up and wait for herd immunity". How much time, and how many deaths, lie between now and that point? I dunno.
This seems pretty straightforward, no? You re-open cautiously, wait a few weeks, make sure your hospital resources aren't being overwhelmed, then open up a bit more, rinse and repeat. I wasn't aware there was another way.