Cultural grievance is not a governing agenda!

Great Debates
181

No, you’re not.

The objection here isn’t, “There are Republicans who believe in God.” The objection was, “There are Republicans who reject objective scientific fact in favor of their personal religious or political ideology.” A belief in “God-guided” evolution doesn’t necessitate ignoring evidence: it’s addressing the question of “why” evolution is a thing, which is not a question science attempts to answer. So long as they’re not ignoring any of the “how” of evolution, they’re not doing the thing that’s being criticized.

182

It’s a romantic notion based on the philosophy of god espoused by Spinoza and Einstein.

To say there is nothing in it that is counter the ToE is uncontroversial, and has the added benefit of being safely unfalsifiable.

183

Well, no, it’s not. This may be what you read in the papers of see on social media, but actual economists doing research in economics are applying the scientific method to questions about economics.

Political ideologues often parrot things they say are based in economics that are not, in fact, based in anything at all.

“GDE” is a lot closer to intelligent design than it is to reason.

184

GDE can mean whatever the author intends it to mean, from YEC to theism. But ID is a specific term of art, invented by Christian Creationists to refer to Creationism. ID doesn’t mean anything besides that.

185

They may try to, but the system is too chaotic and there are too many uncontrolled variables to do any real experiments. Plus there are lots of unexamined assumptions, like economic actors are rational.
That’s not to be down on economists, since that is the way the world is. But perhaps they could mimic those who study another chaotic system, meteorologists, and instead of predicting things say there is a 20% of recession.

186

There’s no actual evidence for any of this, of course, but remember one of the patriarchs saw God’s bum. As I said, God started looking a lot less like a person as Judaism got more sophisticated.
I’ve heard the sapient argument before, but that’s hardly image, is it.

187

This is the real scandal of macroeconomics - it purports to study and then predict the behaviour of a huge set of complex adaptive systems that are by their nature wholly unpredictable. And the evidence shows it - the history of macroeconomic prediction is dismal and is generally indistinguishable from chance once you get more than about a year out.

Economists cop out on that by pointing to events they couldn’t have forseen and say their models would have worked but for those events.

The problem with that excuse is that future economic conditions are dominated by unforseen events. Because in anything but the short term, the future is a random walk through the unknown.

188

A science being difficult doesn’t make it not a science.

You will struggle mightily to show me an actual economist who will say “guaranteed recession coming up!” Like meteorologists, they couch their predictions in probabilities and conditions.

50 years ago, when meteorology was far less good as predicting weather than it is now, was it not a science? Of course it was a science. You can’t replicate the Earth to run a truly controlled experiment that accounts for every variable. They got a lot wrong. It was still a science, though - a systematic, fact-based effort to determine objective truth.

Again, same goes for meteorology. They can’t predict the weather even a month out, much less a year; the system is too chaotic.

More precisely, of course, the system is stochastic. Lots of things are stochastic; radioactive decay is stochastic. Life in Earth is stochastic. Physics and biology are still sciences.

189

Long-term macroeconomic prediction is essentially the Farmer’s Almanac equivalent to meteorology. We have people actually putting numbers to things like the effect on GDP ten years from now from legislation passed today. They’re always wildly wrong.

Even worse, we have people putting numbers to ‘the social cost of carbon’ based not only on what the climate will be like in 70 years, but how much it will cost an economy we have absolutely no idea about.

In 1900, a big environmental worry was what to do with the horse manure piling up in cities. Every long-term macroecomic prediction went out the window in 1939. All macroeconomic predictions prior to 2020 were invalidated by COVID. And so it goes. A complex system is sensitive to initial conditions and responds non-linearly. It is fundamentally unpredictable, and the errors grow with time.

190

In 2010 or so the New Yorker published an article where someone interviewed all the conservative economists at Chicago, who all denied that they got anything wrong in not predicting the crash. The final interview was with Thaler, at the Business School, who basically laughed his head off at them.
And then there was Greenspan who was shocked, shocked, that Wall Street people could be greedy.

Nowhere did I say that economics (or meteorology) isn’t a science. I just said that the kind of experiments and observations called for by the scientific method are hard to do.
I’m sure that in their papers they are not sure about things - any science PhD student learns to be humble at the feet of their advisor. It’s just that in my lifetime we moved from “it’s going to rain” to “an 80% chance of rain.” The media could handle that - why not for economic predictions?

191

Being stochastic isn’t what makes it unpredictable. The movements of molecules in a gas are stochastic, but at large scales gas pressure is perfectly predictable.

What you need for unpredictability is a combination of stochastic input, a high degree of sensitivity to initial conditions, and non-linear responses to those conditions. That’s what defines a complex system, along with the fact that connections between objects are more important to understanding the system than are the objects themselves. Macro generally fails at this, attempting to reduce complex relationships down to simple aggregates that can be manipulated with equations essentially derived from physics.

Even our explanations for observed events are simplified. We look for and are offered simple explanations for why unemployment is where it is, why more women don’t go into a certain field, why markets rise and fall, etc.

Ask an ecologist, “Why did that river change its shape?”, and you aren’t getting a simple explanation. Instead, it’s always some long and complicated chain of events: Wolves were introduced into the area. That scared the grazing animals away from drinking ponds, which enabled beavers to come in, which flooded the area… But then they’ll admit that this was wholly unpredictable, because maybe instead introducing the wolves caused a reduction in rabbits and other small animals, which in turn caused a completely different effect. It wasn’t kjowable until after the fact, and even then all you could learn is how the system evolved that time. Rerunning the experiment might have given a completely different result.

Even understanding the system perfectly doesn’t make it predictable. We understand ant hills extremely well. We xan modelmthem i computers and produce the same behaviur, etc. But even all that kjowledge won’t allow you to predict the evolution of an anthill. Sensitivity to intial conditions: two ants are foraging, and both about tomfind major food supplies. But one ant has to climb over a twig and the other doesn’t and wins the race. So the whole dolony winds up evolving in that directly. The butterfly effect, applied to ants.

People aren’t ants. We’re far less predictable. And human social and economic systems arent just complex, they are complex adaptive systems. That means our ability to learn from past behaviour is very limited, yet that’s exactly what we try to do by building models and testing them with sequestered data from past performance. What if that past performance was a random walk, and if you could repeat the same ‘stimulus’ again and again, you’d get a different result every time? Complexity theory says that’s exactly what would happen.

192

I don’t think science has any problem with the why of evolution. The thing about evolution is: the how and the why are the same thing.

193

FWIW, they don’t even try though. A 10 day forecast is about all you ever see, and realistically speaking you can only really take the nearest 2-3 days to the bank, because every day you go out, the accuracy goes down. So for example, it’s a good idea for me to not plan anything outdoors tomorrow night, as there’s a 60% chance of rain. But the prediction for the 60% chance of rain on Friday is probably slightly better than voodoo, but not much. Anything broader than that is more like “This spring will be cooler and drier than usual.” without specifying what that means exactly.

I’m not so sure either type of economics are really predictive like that- nobody can confidently and definitively say that if you raise the price of a candy bar by X cents, that your sales will fall by Y units per week, or that if tax rates are raised by some amount, then consumer spending will go down according to some formula. Not that it doesn’t make it a science, but it’s considerably less predictive than people might think, or that economists might like. They can say things like "If the Federal government does X, Y and Z, then P, D and Q are likely to happen, but they’re unlikely to be able to predict the degree or even really statistically model the likelihood.

I suspect if economists were as accurate as meteorologists, we’d have a wholly different economic landscape than we do.

194

If you read the actual science reports from the IPCC, they do couch their forecasts around huge uncertainty - so much that the bottom range is little more than the normal warming you would expect to see in the interglacial period, and at the high end absolute disaster. Furthermore, for each specific piece of evidence the IPCC rates it as ‘highly likely’, ‘somewhat likely’, etc. They don’t deal in absolutes.

But then it’s reduced down to ‘summaries for lawmakers’ by non-scientists, then further reduced by the media which likes big scary numbers and headlines that sell to viewers.

I was listening to an interview with the economist Russ Roberts, and he said that he used to get calls from media types all the time, asking him for a prediction of how some bill or investment or invention would affect the economy in the future. He’d tell them that he had no idea, because such things weren’t predictable. So, they’d just thank him and keep calling economists until they found one willing to give them the juicy numbers they wanted, and that’s the person who would get quoted. And eventually they stopped calling Russ Roberts altogether. There’s a big selection effect going on there in favor of macroeconomists willing to say they kjow whatnthe future will be.

It works with fortune tellers, too.

195

One of the problems with economics is that, if they were accurate, they would be wrong again. Traders and consumers would act on an economic prediction immediately, which would make the prediction (assuming it was for longer than next week) wrong.

For example, if an economist could say with certainty that gas prices or inflation or interest rates are going to be X in the third quarter, then the markets would move to make that true now.

196

A good rule of thumb for determining if something is a science: If opinions of vast swaths of practitioners change with political winds, or the field bifurcates based on ideology, it’s not a science but should be considered something else, like philosophy.

I don’t see conservative physicists and liberal physicists differing on whether the Higgs Boson exists. I don’t see chemists changing their ideas because a different political party was elected. But you see this behaviour in the ‘soft’ sciences all the time. Economics has ‘freshwater’ and ‘saltwater’ schools that come to radically different conclusions about the same facts, based on their political priors. Whatever that is, it isn’t science.

Intelligent design fits in that category. If your belief in evolution is informed by your religion, You aren’t behaving scientifically.

197

They do run models a little bit farther out than that, but they are for professionals (and weather-obsessed amateurs) not forecasts for the general public. An example would be the GFS which runs 16 day profiles 4x a day, but it is hardly the only one. The important thing is that those long-range reports are individually extraordinarily variable from run to run, ensembles are more telling but also highly inaccurate that far out and to the best of my limited knowledge no particular model methodology has so far proven consistently more reliable than any other. Instead professionals (the competent ones) look at multiple models and use them as constantly shifting very rough guesstimates that inform actual forecasts only as they get closer to fruition.

198

That’s the ‘adaptive’ part of a CAS. One of my favorite examples was using a positive shock to justify a stimulus. i.e. “When oil boomed it caused X amount of money to be created, and GDP went up by Y amount. So, if we just inject the same money into the economy artificially, we’ll get the same result!” The problem being that once you announce an artificial stimulus, you should expect people to act dofferently than they would if they perceived that real underlying wealth was growing because of more physical resources.

It’s the same logic used by Tuvaluan cargo cults. “Those men put those strange things on their heads and talked into little discs in front of their mouths, and metal birds loaded with treasure came out of the sky! If we just build the same things for the head and mouth, we’ll be rich!”

199

Right, but large stimulus packages actually do work, as you can see from the various COVID packages. Your analysis is sort of back to the rational person analysis (government spending now will result in higher taxes, so I’ll just save the difference for later), and is pretty much debunked.

This is really getting off the main topic, of course.

200

The uncertainty you are talking here is about how much CO2 humans will dump into the atmosphere, Uncertain yes, but once there is a calculation of how much was emitted it told researchers how much of a temperature increase we could expect, and it was the contrarians are the ones that continue to get egg on their faces.

Once the values are known then one can see how ridiculous is the old contrarian item that the warming we see is normal for the interglacial, as others have calculated, currently the temperatures would be colder if there was no increase of human released CO2 as it was seen.

https://www.bloomberg.com/graphics/2015-whats-warming-the-world/