Here.
HT - Bob Murphy who tells me he is too professional to post such things. Readers know you'll never run into that problem here.
Python Test...
4 months ago
"To the American military on Memorial Day, thanks, but no thanks"Another, showing a widely publicized bombing victim of the Iraq War said:
"If this is what must [be] done to 'protect my freedoms,' I greatly prefer that my freedoms be left for me to protect."I want to make two observations about the deluge of these sorts of things that I see.
"My recollection is that Bob Lucas and Ed Prescott were initially very enthusiastic about rational expectations econometrics. After all, it simply involved imposing on ourselves the same high standards we had criticized the Keynesians for failing to live up to. But after about five years of doing likelihood ratio tests on rational expectations models, I recall Bob Lucas and Ed Prescott both telling me that those tests were rejecting too many good models."I believe he made a similar point in this interview, which I linked when he got the Nobel.
"Your recent April 29, 2013 NY Times blog The Italian Miracle is meant to highlight how in high-debt Italy, interest rates have come down since the European Central Bank’s well-placed efforts to act more as a lender of last resort to periphery countries. No disagreement there. However, this positive development is meant to re-enforce your strongly held view that high debt is not a problem (even for Italy) and that causality runs exclusively from slow growth to debt... Indeed, your repeatedly-expressed view that slow growth causes high debt but not visa-versa, is hardly supported by the recent literature on the subject... Of course, it is well known that the economic cycle impacts government finances and therefore debt (causation from growth to debt). Cyclically adjusted budgets have been around for decades, your shallow characterization of the growth-debt connection." [emphasis is mine]It's stuff like this that makes it hard for an objective reader to take them seriously. This obviously has nothing at all to do with Krugman's position - he's never said causality runs exclusively from slow growth to debt. He's gone out of his way to present the alternative. This is common across people that go nuts over Krugman - straw-manning comes with the territory in blogs, but Krugman gets more straw-manning than almost any other economist on the internet right now.
"I actually have no idea what issue you have with Krugman’s piece, as you seem to agree with the individual points he raises in a way that today’s Republican Party does not. Are you confusing right-leaning economists with the right in general? Yes, some conservative intellectuals believe in anthropomorphic climate, expansionary monetary policy in a recession, etc., but they are so noteworthy that there are features written about the fact that they exist. Are there any prominent conservative politicians that hold these views? Any influential members of the conservative movement?"But ESPECIALLY this (which is a point I make a lot too):
"I think it’d be a much better use of your time if you spent half the energy you spend bickering with Keynesians who are roughly in full agreement about our current monetary policy needs on trying to convince prominent conservative politicians and thinkers that their views on inflation and monetary easing are dangerous and wrong. Krugman wrote that spending too much time focusing on his differences with MMT is a waste of time because those disagreements aren’t particularly important right now. I think it’s similarly more important that you spend more time focusing on the people who are loudly and actively opposed to monetary easing. I’ll give you a hint: they aren’t the Keynesians!"Why is there so little high quality critiques of Krugman out there and so much crap? Maybe the question answers itself. Actually the best place for high quality Krugman criticism is Bob Murphy, but this may just be the law of large numbers (if you figure 95% of his criticism misses the mark given the volume of it of course you're going to get some really piercing critiques every couple of weeks). Krugmania is one of the weirdest things in the economics blogosphere, IMO. I don't know why people don't just say "well he gets a little liberal and a little shrill for me sometimes and I don't like that" and leave it at that. Instead they put out some really nutty criticisms.
"It is hardly necessary to say that Post Keynesians reject the ‘old classical’, ‘Bastard Keynesian’ and ‘New Keynesian’ argument that unemployment is due to the existence of a real wage above the equilibrium or ‘market clearing’ level owing to the trade union or government interference in the operation of the free market for labour. They also dismiss the ‘New Classical’ notion that unemployment is the (voluntary) result of intertemporal income-leisure choices by individual workers. As was demonstrated above, neither claim is supported by micro foundations; and neither has any macro foundation whatsoever. A Post Keynesian theory of unemployment would instead start from the proposition that in aggregate the level of employment depends on the level of output, which is itself determined by aggregate demand and therefore heavily influenced by macroeconomic policy. Unemployment is simply the difference between the level of employment and the aggregate supply of labour, which may - as explained earlier - safely be regarded as invariant in the short run with respect to the real wage, but variable with respect to the number of job opportunities.” (King 2002: 84)."I don't think I quite agree with King, at least on the New Keynesian part (or the Post Keynesian part, for that matter) - or at least I think it's misleading. I think the importance of price stickiness for New Keynesianism is often misunderstood. People have this image in their heads of a non-clearing labor market when they hear "sticky prices". The market's just broken for a little while and eventually it'll get back on track. Austrian types don't like the implication that the market's broken. Post Keynesian types don't like the implication that it's just a hiccup.
"There is the dream and the will to found a private kingdom, usually, though not necessarily, also a dynasty. The modern world really does not know any such positions, but what may be attained by industrial and commercial success is still the nearest approach to medieval lordship possible to modern man."The version of this in Hayek is similarly entrepreneurial - dedicated to generating new frameworks rather than fitting into existing frameworks. This, for example, was fairly Nietzschean: "To do the bidding of others is for the employed the condition of achieving his purpose."
"A few points here (a little late, and also WRT your prior post on this issue):I reiterate my advice to economists: by all means throw anything even resembling an intelligence test on the right hand side of the equation if you've got it. It's important heterogeneity worth controlling for. But then you're probably best served ignoring and leaving the interpretation to others because it's questionable whether we really have the chops to talk about it.
If IQ is highly determined by genetics (I defer to the geneticists on this): I believe current research shows it's about 50% genetics, 50% environment (most of the latter being non-normative social experience, that is, not the parents)
IQ is messy, messy, messy. It is a pain to operationalize. Many times, IQ is defined as "general intelligence" -- but what is intelligence? Well, whatever intelligence tests measure.
Other hitches: IQ tests were primarily, if not entirely, developed in the Western world, America in particular. How can we -- unless we are narcissistic ego centrists -- assume that what our society considers is intelligence could really generalize across cultures? And indeed, cross-cultural research pretty routinely reveals that different cultures prioritize different aspects of the human experience; many cultures have words for concepts that are not prominent/discussed in American society. So we might expect cross-cultural differences in scores on IQ tests; that doesn't mean necessarily that people differ on "intelligence", broadly construed. That just means it's ridiculous to expect measurement invariance of a western concept across all cultures.
And also, often, IQ tests are standardized around 100. Constantly standardizing test scores makes it a little difficult to look at changes over time.
Finally, we know that tests -- especially IQ tests -- test both "intelligence", but, to a large extent, also the ability to take tests. This is why, even within the US, we have sub-group differences in IQ. Because different groups have different access to the experiences necessary to develop testing competence. Now, we are working to develop culturally-ungrounded IQ tests (such as the Hannon-Daneman test or the Siena reasoning test), and these tests do help mitigate/decrease sub-group differences in American samples. But, you can see . . . this is a hot mess.
I think IQ is one of the most tricky areas of inquiry in psychology, actually, because in normal everyday conversation we all think we have a sense of what it means, but psychometrically it's fairly problematic. Which does not mean we can ignore it -- it's a great concept and a lot of great work has been done on it! -- but it does mean we have to discuss it in as many forums as possible!"
"I’m going to assume (generously, I think) that the minimum size for a successful colony is 10 000. The only experience we have is the Apollo program, which transported 12 astronauts to the Moon (a distance of 1 light second) at a cost of $100 billion or so (current values). So, assuming linear scaling (again, very generously), that’s a cost of around $10 trillion per light-second for 10 000 people."My question is - how in the world is linear scaling of pricing "very generous"?!?!
"That’s not the part that’s upsetting to me, though, because Niall Ferguson is an asshole, and most of us already knew that. The upsetting part is how few people are even mentioning what a bigoted statement Mr. Ferguson made, and instead treating it as if it were a serious intellectual argument. People all over the world of economics, even when saying Mr. Ferguson was wrong, don’t seem to realize (or care) how incredibly offensive his remarks truly were.
I am a gay man. I am childfree. I am polyamorous. My legacy is mostly going to be my ideas, and any savings I manage to accumulate over my lifetime will not pass to the children I don’t have, but rather to various nonprofit foundations or schools or the like when I die.
Does this make me incapable of thinking about the long run? Of course not. Does this mean that I am predisposed to think only of the here and now? No. Does my relatively hedonistic lifestyle mean that I’m a carefree libertine, living only for today without a thought for tomorrow, incapable of designing policies for the long run? Not in the slightest.
And that’s because I’m a fucking economist. I’m an economist who thinks about the short run, the long run, and everything between. I’m a member of the Long Now Foundation who thinks that space exploration is a great idea for the future of mankind, despite its lack of direct benefit to humans right now. One of the fields I plan to specialize in is economic development, and you really can’t get much more long-run than that. It doesn’t matter that I’m white, overweight, gay, atheist, polyamorous, or, yes, even childfree.
So we can talk about how sodomy and usury were seen as sinful because of Aristotle [DK: an Alex Tabbarrok post - Alex of course wasn't advocating this idea], or about how Keynes’s quote was taken out of context [DK: lots of us, me included], or about how maybe Mr. Ferguson wasn’t entirely wrong [DK: Kurt Schuler - but I think Dave needs to read this closely. Kurt was not agreeing with Ferguson's point at all - he was making a far more reasonable point about the potential relevance of Keynes's homosexuality {really bisexuality - why do we keep saying homosexuality??}] (and seriously? Fuck that guy). But the point everyone is missing here is that Mr. Ferguson has impugned the abilities of every bright, motivated gay kid who might want to go into economics. And this is not the first time someone has made this argument, and nobody seems to be stepping up and saying “that argument is bullshit - being gay doesn’t make someone a totally shortsighted hedonist, and saying so is offensive“.
That failure to call him out is going to discourage entry of gay students into the field. It’s going to keep economics a club mostly for straight white males, and as a result the field will rot and die as it loses relevance to anyone else. How’s that for considering long-run outcomes?"
"Having gone to the link you supplied, I can firmly answer, yes, it seems completely off-base. For example: What If there is positive migrant selection? What if factors others than you mentioned can raise IQ, and those factors are more likely to be present in immigrant families in their new environments? What if statistically the positive or negative effects on countries both sending and receiving are negligible?If there's positive selection then Latino immigrants ought to have higher IQ than the native white population. Isn't that the obvious conclusion?
Were the populations of countries from which waves of immigrants previously came to the U.S. noticeably smarter and the U.S. population noticeably dumber after these waves?
I can't imagine, Mr. Kuehn, what motivated you to get into this issue from the angle you did. Perhaps you suffered from Blogger's Disease, which is characterized by writing the first thing that pops into your head and then publishing it rather than reconsidering before publication."
Daniel Kuehn is a doctoral candidate and adjunct professor in the Economics Department at American University. He has a master's degree in public policy from George Washington University.