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Danish government makes its new economic model open source

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Re: Danish government makes its new economic model open source

#151

Post by tomrod »

drran wrote: post #150
tomrod wrote: post #149

Earlier quoted context omitted.

While I appreciate the great efforts to put hand-waving FUD via terminal histogram graphics for insertion into comments[0] (seriously, great job!), your point that the middle class is guaranteed to implode is nonsensical. The US already has a non-zero UBI[1], it's simply inefficiently distributed via the negative income tax rate and various welfare efforts. That's a clear first area to fix things up. Then, if we need…

If you're not a bot, then respond to my question.

I must be getting awfully good at hitting the heart of the problem instead of feeding trolls if people are thinking I'm a bot. Turing tests ftw.

I answered your earlier questions already. I encourage you to read full threads.

Re: Danish government makes its new economic model open source

#152

Post by xunn0026 »

mortehu wrote: post #57
xunn0026 wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Excuse me? Of course! Do people get to declare their name and pronoun?

If that's your whole reasoning I think "of course!" is an overstatement.

HN really needs an /s every time.

Re: Danish government makes its new economic model open source

#153

Post by fifilura »

MAKROmaker wrote: post #32
cs702 wrote: post #18

Wow, cool! The model is specified as a constrained nonlinear optimization problem for which a solution is found using high-quality proprietary numerical solvers.[a] All partial differential equations specifying the model have a basis in economic theory or in heuristics and approximations shown to be consistent with reality. Parameters come directly from (what I assume is a large amount of) economic data collected by…

Thanks! Julia was not even in 1.0 when we started the project, but would absolutely be a great choice today. So far, only the Conopt4 solver can solve our model, which means we have to go through GAMS even if we rewrite in Julia. I saw Rackauckas' JuliaCon presentation where he talks about ML approximations and immediately got excited too.

I have one question, that i ask with genuine interest, since I have been in a similar position before (although certainly not as advanced).

When you develop models like this, what is your stance on testing? All that stuff in a software engineers toolbox, unittests, integration tests, exploratory tests, manual tests etc.

Re: Danish government makes its new economic model open source

#154

Post by ZeroGravitas »

abdullahkhalids wrote: post #112
mbar84 wrote: post #67

Economics is not a science like physics. We can't do controlled experiments, we can't falsify hypothesis. This leads to very muddy waters and what you are left with are two kinds of economists: Those who tell people what they want to hear and those nobody listens to. Econometrics gives people everything they want to hear, and with a scientific veneer as a bonus. The HN crowd should however appreciate how susceptible…

Please note that the origins of modern science in Europe lie in astronomy [1]. Astronomy has always has been and is an observational science, yet has been enormously successful at creating models of what we see in the skies. Would you critique astronomy the same ways as economics? What is the critical difference? [1] Yes, there was a lot of simultaneous work in other areas as well.

A more revealing symmetry is what happened in Astronomy when a powerful political force didn't like the answer the scientists were coming up with, Galileo vs the Church. (More recent examples are climate change and COVID, but let's not get too controversial).

So when we criticize "economists" are we criticizing the scientists like Galileo and Copernicus that were right and got their books banned, or are we criticizing the ones that supported the political power of the day?

Note that some of those scientist would have genuinely believed their 'church-approved' theories. Just their opponents couldn't challenge them openly without incurring wrath.

And would generic criticism of "scientists" have benefitted science or the established political power at that time?

Re: Danish government makes its new economic model open source

#155

Post by imtringued »

mbar84 wrote: post #67

Economics is not a science like physics. We can't do controlled experiments, we can't falsify hypothesis. This leads to very muddy waters and what you are left with are two kinds of economists: Those who tell people what they want to hear and those nobody listens to. Econometrics gives people everything they want to hear, and with a scientific veneer as a bonus. The HN crowd should however appreciate how susceptible…

Neo classical economics is actually a regression even vs classical economics. The moment it became a hard science it lost the human element and became someone's optimization fetish even though nobody can even know what it optimizes for.

The even worse part is that some assumptions don't even work in once you look at the math of e.g. accounting.

Keynes and Silvio Gesell and Wolfgang Stützel are much closer to how our accounting system known as money works even though both of them lived during a gold standard where it was normal to bend some accounting rules like digging out new gold to create more money or just bend them outright by printing money without any asset backing it.

Re: Danish government makes its new economic model open source

#156

Post by imtringued »

hgomersall wrote: post #126
cycomanic wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The parts of economics that are valuable are not based on econometrics, but upon reasoning from first principles: Incentives, supply and demand, game theory etc. under which I would argue all of your examples fall. So how do you confirm these first principles? I'd argue that those are an even wider door to let your biases flow into the analysis. I mean this type of argument has given us trickle down economics which…

It's worse than that, not only are the first principles demonstrably flawed, the towering edifice built on top fails due to some very iffy analysis. It's remarkable how much time and effort goes into attempting to maintain the idea of equilibrium in economics. You can only add so many epicycles before you should perhaps consider your model is wrong.

Economists don't believe in their own theories. I see people simply declare the market free when it is clear that it is not or people claim Says Law is infallible when it actually can be used to predict the exact opposite of what it is usually lazily abused for.

For example people use says law to argue saving does not create unemployment but says law can also be interpreted as saving is impossible over the long run and therefore unemployment shouldn't happen either.

Re: Danish government makes its new economic model open source

#157

Post by jhgb »

tomrod wrote: post #143
jhgb wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> regardless of economy or stability. So you're saying that you're a poor economist, then.

There are very few good economists.

Possibly, but surely only a few of them would be that bad to be willing to cut off their noses to spite their faces like that.

Re: Danish government makes its new economic model open source

#158

Post by thomasahle »

I wonder if this could be used to automatically suggest new policies? Presumably the optimizer will tell you exactly which input variables to tweak to increase the final number/gpd/which ever.

As the saying goes "any metric is bad once you optimize for it", so maybe that would lead to terrible politics.

That makes me worry if large actors can use the model to make any self-serving policy suggestion "look" like a good idea for the economy, by combining it with precise information on what the national economics model is sensitive to or isn't.

Re: Danish government makes its new economic model open source

#159

Post by LudwigNagasena »

gtsop wrote: post #122
mbar84 wrote: post #67

Economics is not a science like physics. We can't do controlled experiments, we can't falsify hypothesis. This leads to very muddy waters and what you are left with are two kinds of economists: Those who tell people what they want to hear and those nobody listens to. Econometrics gives people everything they want to hear, and with a scientific veneer as a bonus. The HN crowd should however appreciate how susceptible…

> Economics is not a science like physics. It's not that economics can't be a science like physics. It's that (most) economists don't treat it like a science.

It's actually the opposite. Lots of economists (maybe overzealously) discard any statement that doesn't have a model behind it.

Re: Danish government makes its new economic model open source

#160

Post by LudwigNagasena »

imtringued wrote: post #155
mbar84 wrote: post #67

Economics is not a science like physics. We can't do controlled experiments, we can't falsify hypothesis. This leads to very muddy waters and what you are left with are two kinds of economists: Those who tell people what they want to hear and those nobody listens to. Econometrics gives people everything they want to hear, and with a scientific veneer as a bonus. The HN crowd should however appreciate how susceptible…

Neo classical economics is actually a regression even vs classical economics. The moment it became a hard science it lost the human element and became someone's optimization fetish even though nobody can even know what it optimizes for. The even worse part is that some assumptions don't even work in once you look at the math of e.g. accounting. Keynes and Silvio Gesell and Wolfgang Stützel are much closer to how our…

>The even worse part is that some assumptions don't even work in once you look at the math of e.g. accounting.

Assumptions don't need to be absolutely true, they have to be good enough to have predictive power.

>Keynes and Silvio Gesell and Wolfgang Stützel are much closer to how our accounting system known as money works

I doubt.

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