tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-37798767.post2036603489519975712..comments2023-12-13T04:20:40.592-08:00Comments on Middle-Class Death Trips: Krugman Softpedals the Woes of EconomicsChris Newfieldhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01078395415386100872noreply@blogger.comBlogger2125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-37798767.post-60509062002636098752009-09-14T03:27:46.895-07:002009-09-14T03:27:46.895-07:00Let me throw my two-pence here. As a physicist by ...Let me throw my two-pence here. As a physicist by trade, I see the biggest weakness of academic economics in the fact that the internal measure of "worth" it uses for its practitioners is only weakly correlated with the *predictive* power of their ideas. Case in point: Larry Summers, widely lauded in the in the economists' circles as one of the best and brightest. Based on what, may I ask? What are the important predictions he has made? Has he foreseen the inevitable crash? What about another "brilliant mind", a former Princeton prof Bernanke? Whenever your worth is measured by how cleverly and elegantly you describe what has already happened, rather than what *will happen* should your theories turn out to be correct, a fertile ground for orthodoxies to take hold is created. Neo-classicist in economics, marxist in sociology - you name it. And this has nothing to do with political leanings of its practitioners but rather with what passes for the standard of rigour in a particular discipline. In fact, we do not have to visit other academic disciplines: there are ample examples of stagnation and flourishing orthodoxies throughout the history of Physics whenever cleverness and self-consistency of arguments was allowed to replace being able to predict observable outcomes. Self-consistency is important, of course, but it is the latter that makes Physics different from e.g. Mathematics (or even the string theory, for that matter). Notice that mathematicians and string theorists will talk about the beauty of the internal structure in their fields (and I'm with them there) -- and this is exactly the arguments that Krugman gives in defense of modern academic economics. There is, however, an objective reason why Mathematics is not designed (and the string theory cannot, at least in the foreseeable future) to rely on the predictive power as a measuring stick for the internal rigour; I see no such excuse for academic economists. And until the standards in their field change, I would strongly suspect that the real answer to Krugman's question "How Did Economists Get It So Wrong?" is intellectual sloppiness bordering on incompetence. And as long as this is the case, I am not too optimistic seeing people like Bernanke or Summers at the helm...TBnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-37798767.post-58755670883108981652009-09-07T09:00:47.172-07:002009-09-07T09:00:47.172-07:00There is another implication in what you write, Ch...There is another implication in what you write, Chris, that it's not just the economists that have traded money for truth. One gets the impression that we have lost, or are losing, at the highest levels of professional practice the ability to have a discourse that's dialectic, that challenges to build up, not to tear down and get ahead. One might posit, money has bought out most of our civic discourse. This would perhaps be in line with Joan Roelofs premise that "liberal" foundations, for one, have sought control over civic discourse, transforming local passion and self-direction to generified knowledge and an appeal to collaboration that under the cover of everyone getting along and sharing actually intends suppression of outside the box ideas that can't be accommodated in a consensus vision of society. <br /><br />The thought in all this is, are we losing our capacity to have a high end productive discourse that doesn't get diverted, and reduced, by money? I'm looking around for forums and expert deliberations that are active and not government, foundation, or market bounded. If the middle class cannot surface anything in discourse but reprising the set piece consensus truisms provided to them, then debate is a closed system of ceremonially touching some few of the known points, something more akin to public reminders than discovery. Nothing comes of it other than a statement of concern in various tones, and events move on regardless.Gerry Barnetthttps://www.blogger.com/profile/02697981765225241196noreply@blogger.com