mustang19:Sorry, I meant to say that America is communist.
That also doesn't explain to me what you mean by "free market". Try again.
Don't expect me to get tired of responding to you, either.
The keyboard is mightier than the gun.
Non parit potestas ipsius auctoritatem.
Voluntaryism Forum
Perhaps you'd be so bold as to explain in more detail just what in the world this means.
You didn't offer evidence to contradict the claim that public R&D raised income or that it didn't crowd in private R&D. You attempted to cast doubt on empirical evidence in general.
Serpentis-Lucis:@ Autolykos You've seen RevLeft right? If you were to go to that site and get banned would you consider it a bad thing or a good thing? Mustang see's the people on this site about the same way we would see people at RevLeft, he believes we are dogmatic in our beliefs, and thus he would consider it a compliment to be banned.
You've seen RevLeft right? If you were to go to that site and get banned would you consider it a bad thing or a good thing? Mustang see's the people on this site about the same way we would see people at RevLeft, he believes we are dogmatic in our beliefs, and thus he would consider it a compliment to be banned.
No, Mustang19 made it clear in that post I linked that he's here primarily to sow discord per se and secondarily to rack up forum bans per se. So I don't think ideology has much to do with it. I remain convinced that he's a troll.
mustang19:You didn't offer evidence to contradict the claim that public R&D raised income or that it didn't crowd in private R&D. You attempted to cast doubt on empirical evidence in general.
You mean I refuse to be confined by a methodology that, as I pointed out, is flawed.
You mean I refuse to be confined by a flawed methodology.
If the process of collecting and analyzing empirical data is a flawed methodology, that may be true in your opinion. It doesn't reverse the preponderance of evidence.
tl;dr There's more evidence that I was right, and almost zero in your favor.
mustang19:If the process of collecting and analyzing empirical data is a flawed methodology, that may be true in your opinion. It doesn't reverse the preponderance of evidence. tl;dr There's more evidence that I was right, and almost zero in your favor.
tl;dr The above is another strawman.
So now you don't think empiricism is a flawed methodology?
False dilemma.
I agree that I didn't prove that government was perfect. You didn't disprove that it was nice.
So now you're going around in circles. Why am I not surprised?
It's becoming clearer to me that you reeeaaally want to add another ban screenshot to your "scrapbook".
Because you didn't deny that I had presented more facts and evidence during the argument, and offer no way to disprove my point.
Are you now saying that you made a deductive argument?
Yup. Are you saying that you win by default? What is your position, even?
Where exactly did you make a deductive (instead of an inductive) argument? All I can see is you making inductive arguments, which are by definition not deductively valid.
Yeah, what you said.
I asked you a question. Are you afraid to answer it? Or what?
My answer is: "Yes."
By the way, this is what a Greek socialist congresswoman looks like.
That's all the DD-ductive reasoning I'll ever need!
No one has yet mentioned the role of the entrepreneur. Hedge funds are not run by economists, they are run by entrepreneurs. The entrepreneur might use a combination of Tarot-card reading, Voodoo and rain dancing as his "investment strategy". If it works, he will make a profit even if no one can figure out why it worked, including he himself. We never hear about the entrepreneurs who hire people to make big spreadsheets and look at "technicals" all day - that is, investing "by the book" - but go bankrupt anyway. They simply disappear out of the market and go back to selling used cars or whatever it was they were doing before they duped some people into letting them fritter their money away in the world's biggest casino, Wall Street.
That other entrepreneurs who superficially appear to be following the "spreadsheet strategy" are not going bankrupt is not, in itself, evidence that spreadsheet/technical investing actually works. It could be evidence that their board members are big insiders, that is, insiders who generally operate beyond the reach of the SEC. Who knows.
The point is that entrepreneurialism is a kind of speculation - it is speculation on business models. The entrepreneur chooses a business model to try, rolls it out into the market and then he either makes a profit or goes bankrupt. It is the market that selects which business models survive and which fail. Understanding why the market selected Windows rather than Mac or QWERTY rather than Dvorak is always an ex post facto 20/20 exercise. Predicting which the market will select is, in fact, impossible. An entrepreneur with the right insight might make the correct prediction and he might even make that prediction based on the true reasons that the market will select his business model and become a wealthy man but there is not necessarily anything generalizable in his insight.
And that's the mistake of a lot of thinking about the role of economics. People tend to think that economics is the study of "what successful businessmen did right." It's not. It's something more fundamental than that. Organizational behavior is probably a field more in line with what people think of as the role of economics.
Economists don't predict things. They explain the inevitable consequences of voluntary human behavior.
Clayton -
mustang19:My answer is: "Yes."
"Yes" doesn't tell me where exactly you made a deductive argument. Try again.
Really? The Fed doesn't make predictions either.
Hedge fund choices don't conclusively prove anything, but it's highly amusing to see the very adivsory firms the market selects take the opinions they do. Which brings us to the next question: Hot libertarians?
mustang19:By the way, this is what a Greek socialist congresswoman looks like. [...] That's all the DD-ductive reasoning I'll ever need!
[...]
I like this picture better:
>what auto is doing at his desk
Pretty accurate I'd say.
Correct, it is an impossible action.
"As in a kaleidoscope, the constellation of forces operating in the system as a whole is ever changing." - Ludwig Lachmann
"When A Man Dies A World Goes Out of Existence" - GLS Shackle
Read Aristophane's signature when you get the chance.
mustang19:>what auto is doing at his desk Pretty accurate I'd say.
Ah yes, the old "I know you are, but what am I?" trick. Nice try. Actually no, scratch that. You get a yawn instead.
mustang19:So we agree that empirical economics isn't completely useless- actually, that it's used sometimes in free market economics. Perhaps things are different outside GMU academia.
Here we go again with the misused obscure references. As I said, I realize you're trying to look hip and in-the-know when you do this kind of thing, but it actually does the opposite and just shines a light on your utter ignorance. If you want to come off knowledgable, it might help if you actually became knowledgable.
What? I actually took an economics class there. Don't blame me, it was called "Economics of Development" and I had no idea!
Next you'll be saying that your recent stay at a Holiday Inn qualifies you to knock down the strawmen you've set up.
Clayton:The point is that entrepreneurialism is a kind of speculation - it is speculation on business models.
+1 Clayton. Good post.
If I had a cake and ate it, it can be concluded that I do not have it anymore. HHH
Once again you completely misunderstood what I said. The point was that you cannot know the exact future level of savings from past data. Do you really deny this? The irony is that your point about the identity still existing shows that you actually draw upon praxeology, which all economists must ultimately draw upon even if they disparage it.
Also, I was talking about physical constants.
Once again your entire argument in this thread is based on the post hoc ergo propter hoc fallacy. Do you believe that the 'economists' that use past prices in order to forecast future prices yet go bankrupt prove that empirical evidence has no place in economic theory? Didn't think so. Your argument is simply 'heads I win, tails you lose': if the entrepreneurs do well, they prove that empirical evidence can predict the future, while if they do poorly, they simply didn't understand the evidence correctly. Forecasting is not predicting. It is ultimately based on what we can call a 'hunch', and not on anything that we can call a science - even if the forecast turns out to be correct.
Damn... 70 posts, 1 thread, 12 hours, 5 participants.
This thread is on fire for this site....
Anyway, carry on.
@ Aristippus
+1, Great post. I suppose it will be said as long as it needs to be...
The Anarch is to the Anarchist what the Monarch is to the Monarchist. -Ernst Jünger
Experience is necessarily of past events. It can be resorted to for the prediction of future events only with the aid of the assumption that an invariable uniformity prevails in the concatenation and succession of natural phenomena. [...] The "category of causality" is our inbuilt conception that past regularity predicts future regularity. That conception is a prerequisite to all reasoning regarding cause and effect in the natural world. As Mises wrote, agreeing with Hume, there is no deductive proof that past regularity predicts future regularity. [...] First let us reflect on the methodology of geometry. In preclassical times, geometry was largely empirical. For example, ancient Egyptian surveyors called “rope stretchers” used to find right angles by stretching out knotted ropes to make a 3-4-5 triangle (a triangle with sides in the ratio of 3 to 4 to 5). The geometric principle that all 3-4-5 triangles form right angles might have been discovered by the Egyptians through experience, by simply noticing that such triangles generally have perpendicular legs by eyeballing multiple instances of them. However, the ancient Greeks pioneered using long chains of deductive inferences to discover geometric principles (fortunately, there was no ancient Greek Congressman Clay at the time to deride this deductive scientific enterprise). And so the Greeks could discover the same principle (that all 3-4-5 triangles form right angles) by reasoning from the Pythagorean theorem. And the Greeks were able to use deductive geometry to discover a great many geometric principles that would have been too subtle to find with empirical methods.[32] Nowadays the deductive method for geometry is universally embraced. A good geometry teacher will not demonstrate the Pythagorean theorem with measuring tape and a pile of plastic right triangles, except perhaps as a preliminary exercise. She will teach her students to derive the theorem from prior premises. What if, when measuring plastic triangles, one of the geometry teacher’s students discovers something that does not seem to fit the Pythagorean theorem as it was taught to him by the teacher? There are a few possible explanations for such an occurrence. Perhaps the teacher, bizarrely, doesn’t know the correct Pythagorean theorem herself, or how to derive it. An economic analogy to this situation is when a theoretical economist introduces vicious formulations (as the classical economists did with their value theory) and invalid reasoning (as Keynes did with much of his work) to build a false economic theorem. Perhaps the student measured the right triangles incorrectly. This would be analogous to an economic statistician gathering faulty data. Perhaps the student is not even dealing with right triangles in the first place, and so the Pythagorean theorem is not applicable. This would be analogous to an economist trying to explain a rise in a good’s price using the quantity theory of money when the quantity of money didn’t actually change, and instead the price rose because of an increase in demand. If economic data do not seem to demonstrate the playing out of a certain market process described by economic theory (assuming the theory is sound and the data are correct), that would indicate that circumstances must have been dominated by another market process (also described by pure economic theory), another set of factors, or the interplay of several market processes/sets of factors. The economic historian uses data to determine which economic laws are most relevant in any given episode. If, for example, the economic historian discovers trustworthy data that show that after an increase in the supply of a certain good the price for that good increased, instead of falling, that would not testify against the law of supply. That would instead be an indication that other relevant factors are at work, like perhaps a precipitous drop in the supply of another good for which the first good can serve as a substitute. Whatever the case ultimately proves to be, what should the geometry student do when faced with data that do not harmonize with the theory he is using? Should he proudly announce that he has refuted the “orthodoxy of Pythagoras” and publish a new theorem, based on his measurements? Should he gather a larger sample set of plastic triangles and perform statistical analysis on the data gathered? Of course not. He should check the soundness of the reasoning used in deriving the theorem, check his measurements, and check the applicability of the theorem to the data. Insofar as the student derived the Pythagorean theorem using discursive reasoning, he was a geometer. But insofar as he was using geometry along with measurement to study plastic triangles, he was a topographer, not a geometer. While geometry is indispensable for topography, it is completely invalid to try to derive geometric laws from topography. This is analogous to the crucial distinction between economics and economic history. Insofar as a scholar derives economic theorems using discursive reasoning, he is an economist. But insofar as he uses economics along with data-gathering to study actual events, he is an economic historian, not an economist. While economics is indispensable for economic history, it is completely invalid to try to derive economic laws from history.
Engineer / Data Analyst here
Empirical evidence is composed of factual data collected through controlled experiments. Observational evidence is composed of data collected through uncontrolled experiments. In the field of economics, very little evidence is empirical. The field is dominated by observation evidence. The methods employed in generating knowledge in the field of economics are deduction or induction.
The method of induction by its nature requires evidence. This evidence in economics is strictly observational. Generally observational evidence suffers from multicollinearity. Data which you collect for your specific inquiry may be influenced by events/processes/dynamics not related to your inquiry. Any conclusions that you may draw will be highly uncertain. Further complications arise when judging the predictive power of models produced from data collected from uncontrolled experiments. The data used to compare predictions against is collected from uncontrolled experiments. Uncertainty regarding conclusions increases.
Now quantitative models in economics are complete rubbish. They are statistical models produced by data collected by uncontrolled experiments. Ergo, whatever dynamic the model is supposedly trying to predict, it is not. It is predicting the data with high multicollinearity. Causality is simply ignored in time series and stochastic models. Over-determination is rife. Most papers do not even attempt to engage in validation processes because, more often than not, measures of accuracy will display that model is less accurate than the measures of accuracy involved in the construction process. Quantitative models in economics amount to nothing more than voodoo intertwined with mathematical symbols.
The deductive method of inquiry can produce qualitative models which the predictive power of the model can be judged. An example would be the principle of supply and demand in determining being indirectly validated by interventions in the economy such as rapid expansion of the money supply. It is observed that the prices of goods and services increase.
@proxyamenra:
Solid post!
I know what you mean. I checked the forum at about 9 this morning and see 7 responses. I checked again and there were two pages. We may have to make a thread to talk about this thread.
Just as a bit of support proxyamenra's excellent post, I thought I might link here, to where a most recent Nobel Prize winning economist just got through admitting how "[economic models] are abstractions that make very simple assumptions that aren't realistic."
+1 proxyamenra... you speak my language!
Once again you completely misunderstood what I said.
You claimed there are no constant quantities in economics. I noted that the definition of a "constant" is arbitrary and any such number could be input in place of a variable in order to apply a theory. Need a theory for the case when "savings is $1"? Set savings constant to 1. This is very semantic.
The point was that you cannot know the exact future level of savings from past data. Do you really deny this? The irony is that your point about the identity still existing shows that you actually draw upon praxeology, which all economists must ultimately draw upon even if they disparage it.
This is all true. However, apart from your use of praxeology (which mainstream economists do not necessarily draw on), the same could be said for any number of predictive models in biology, physics, or just about any other science. Predictive models are used often in other scientific fields to forecast (not "know") future values of variables.
Not all values in physics, etc, are derived from physical constants. If you were to split off the parts of engineering, like strength of materials, which rely on empirical data, would that suddenly invalidate them? No.
Forecasts are not predictions! There we go.
I agree it doesn't prove anything. It's just an amusing phenomenon to see capitalist market agents have their own opinions.
And yet, banks still use them a great deal in economic forecasts. That might just make them worth something. Microeconomic evidence in particular does allow for controlled behavioral experiments.
This is analogous to the crucial distinction between economics and economic history. Insofar as a scholar derives economic theorems using discursive reasoning, he is an economist. But insofar as he uses economics along with data-gathering to study actual events, he is an economic historian, not an economist. While economics is indispensable for economic history, it is completely invalid to try to derive economic laws from history.