Right, but if you’re watching someone blow up a balloon, you know eventually it will pop even if you don’t know exactly when. That doesn’t mean you’re wrong to suggest we should stop inflating the balloon to avoid the pop.
If you just say the market will crash, maybe it will or maybe it won’t. If you say that the conditions exist for a crash, and describe them accurately, you’re right whether there is a crash or not.
And if you say there’s 100% chance, not only are you likely to be wrong, you’re also a useless moron deserving of ridicule.
if you’re watching someone blow up a balloon, you know eventually it will pop even if you don’t know exactly when.
There are two problems with this.
1: When a lot of people are making money by inflating the balloon, telling them to stop is not going to work well.
2: If the ballon ends up taking 20 breaths to pop and you are telling them to stop every time they blow in the ballon and it doesn’t for the first 19 times, they tend to think you are the boy who cried wolf and just keep on ignoring you.
Economics is great at coming up with plausible sounding stories about why things happened, but that doesn’t mean those explanations are correct. The fact that the same theories lead to incorrect predictions is a strong indicator that the explanations are wrong, too.
Or to put it more bluntly, most of the field of economics looks a lot like a pseudoscience.
Economists have predicted 20 of the last 5 recessions…
Economics is great at explaining why something happened or what may happen in the future but complete shit at predicting when something will happen.
For a decade in the run up to the 2008 housing crash everyone was saying it was just around the corner but they were wrong for 9 of the 10 years.
If every year you predict the world will end or the market will crash, eventually you will be correct…
Right, but if you’re watching someone blow up a balloon, you know eventually it will pop even if you don’t know exactly when. That doesn’t mean you’re wrong to suggest we should stop inflating the balloon to avoid the pop.
If you just say the market will crash, maybe it will or maybe it won’t. If you say that the conditions exist for a crash, and describe them accurately, you’re right whether there is a crash or not.
And if you say there’s 100% chance, not only are you likely to be wrong, you’re also a useless moron deserving of ridicule.
There are two problems with this.
1: When a lot of people are making money by inflating the balloon, telling them to stop is not going to work well.
2: If the ballon ends up taking 20 breaths to pop and you are telling them to stop every time they blow in the ballon and it doesn’t for the first 19 times, they tend to think you are the boy who cried wolf and just keep on ignoring you.
And if you can make money by getting as close as possible to the pop while still stopping in time, many people will take that gamble
Economics is great at coming up with plausible sounding stories about why things happened, but that doesn’t mean those explanations are correct. The fact that the same theories lead to incorrect predictions is a strong indicator that the explanations are wrong, too.
Or to put it more bluntly, most of the field of economics looks a lot like a pseudoscience.
Well, when one of the founding assumptions is that humans make rational economic decisions, you are in for a bad time.
What if you assume they have infinite time horizons or instantaneous and free transaction costs over infinite distances?
I called this out when I was 19 and first took econ 101.
I was like, the foundational premise of this entire field is demonstrably wrong, wtf
Yep. It is like starting geometry by saying. “Lets assume π = 3.”
Shhh. Picketty might hear you.
I may have been early but I’m not wrong
A broken clock is right two times a day.
A slow running clock is still broken but technically right even less often. I use that metaphor at work to describe bad co-workers.
Yes, but because it is broken, you never know when it is right. So even when it is correct it is still useless.
Exactly.
Now that analog blocks are rare, is this even valid anymore?