61–70 of 112 posts
Curious analogy As a graduate student, he'd just found serious problems in a famous economic study — the academic equivalent of a D-league basketball player dunking on LeBron James.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Nor is this surprising; the reason nobody looked too closely at the numbers is because they agree broadly with every other paper and model out there. The data Reinhart and Rogoff used hadn't been analysed together before so their work was original, and it got widely cited. The results failed to be reproducible, and now the analysis has been found to have multiple methodological errors, of which the spreadsheet erro…
I suspect it isn't hard to find papers that show a link between high debt levels and weak economic growth. Or do you think the consensus among economists is that no such relationship exists?
You would be surprised how many things that exist around you are based around faulty models based on incorrect data - that's the problem with higher dimensional fields like economics and finance - it's hard to separate cause and effect and extract principal signals for an arbitrary phenomena, without getting bogged down in correlation hell. You have been warned - the further fields get from pure mathematics and isola…
who on earth thought austerity was ever a good idea? Lots of sensible people. The point of austerity is to stop spending money you don't have on stuff which does not clearly contribute to economic improvement. Every increase in debt must be balanced with a reasonable objective expectation that it will facilitate specific & significant increase in revenue greater than the debt and servicing thereof. If you've spent yo…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
who on earth thought austerity was ever a good idea? Lots of sensible people. The point of austerity is to stop spending money you don't have on stuff which does not clearly contribute to economic improvement. Every increase in debt must be balanced with a reasonable objective expectation that it will facilitate specific & significant increase in revenue greater than the debt and servicing thereof. If you've spent yo…
Sensible people like Paul Ryan? Now, that's rich.
You would be surprised how many things that exist around you are based around faulty models based on incorrect data - that's the problem with higher dimensional fields like economics and finance - it's hard to separate cause and effect and extract principal signals for an arbitrary phenomena, without getting bogged down in correlation hell. You have been warned - the further fields get from pure mathematics and isola…
In the case of economics it seems there might also be large conflicts of interest at play. The 2010 documentary, "Inside Job" http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inside_Job_(film) about the economic crises talks about how several prominent academic economists are essentially paid to author studies that amount to not much more than puff pieces supporting a political view point of a political party or corporation. On another…
It's alarming how people think low rates -> loose money. This has never been true in the history of central banking. Nobody would suppose Japan has loose money, or that the 70s had tight money.
Curious analogy As a graduate student, he'd just found serious problems in a famous economic study — the academic equivalent of a D-league basketball player dunking on LeBron James.
You would be surprised how many things that exist around you are based around faulty models based on incorrect data - that's the problem with higher dimensional fields like economics and finance - it's hard to separate cause and effect and extract principal signals for an arbitrary phenomena, without getting bogged down in correlation hell. You have been warned - the further fields get from pure mathematics and isola…
who on earth thought austerity was ever a good idea? Lots of sensible people. The point of austerity is to stop spending money you don't have on stuff which does not clearly contribute to economic improvement. Every increase in debt must be balanced with a reasonable objective expectation that it will facilitate specific & significant increase in revenue greater than the debt and servicing thereof. If you've spent yo…
For example, a basic principle for centuries was that metal is too heavy to float, therefore it was clearly too heavy to fly. Simple, basic, and completely wrong - see for example today's airplanes.
This is not to say that the opponents of austerity must have it all figured out, but rather that history has not been kind to ideas of the form "this complex system must surely follow certain common sense principles".
Earlier quoted context omitted.
who on earth thought austerity was ever a good idea? Lots of sensible people. The point of austerity is to stop spending money you don't have on stuff which does not clearly contribute to economic improvement. Every increase in debt must be balanced with a reasonable objective expectation that it will facilitate specific & significant increase in revenue greater than the debt and servicing thereof. If you've spent yo…
Sensible people like Paul Ryan? Now, that's rich.