Getting Away With Nazi Warcrimes!

[ParkCungHee]

Oh, come on, that's and you know it. Doctors do want to see AIDS cured and don't write off the possibility of working towards that, even when they themselves cannot, for lack of appropriate talents, add to that work.

So they're rooting for aids to be cured at some point in the future, but they want it to exist right now. So they're not cruel misanthropes, they just hate people who have AIDS right now.

 

[LightSpectra]

It's exactly the opposite of Mathus' attitude!

Did he even have an attitude? I thought it's been established that his observations on economics tried to have an air of scientific objectivity, and if he had any sort of positive attitude about it, then he wasn't public about it.

As to the discussion about evil: actions are evil, and habitual evil actions are called vices. When we say that a person is evil, we're saying that he has vicious habits, not that his essence is defective.

 

[mghani]

So in essence, there's no actual proof that Malthus thought that starvation was a desirable thing. Furthermore, Furedi agrees with me. Noting as he does that Malthus opposed population growth and welfare because it intensified impoverishment. This shows that Malthus' position was fundamentally humane even if it was misguided.

How does Furedi agree with you? he simply points out that the ulterior motive behind Malthus' theory was to oppose the the optimistic humanitarianism of his contemporaries. In other words, He mobilized the arguments about the dangers of population growth as weapons in his battle of ideas against social reform. (.

Right, the Beagle hadn't even left port at this stage; so I suppose Malthus predicted Evolution a little while before he made a stab at Eugenics.

your point?

Great, I'm fairly sure Malthus wouldn't have approved of the wholesale genocide of Jews. Neither would have Darwin or Mendel, I suppose, but Evolution is one rationalization away from Eugenics.

Where did i ever say he endorsed genocide. I simply point out that he was an ispiration for these antihuman beliefs, even now with the advent of neo-malthusianism.

I did and I'll reiterate that 'aspires' is rather distinct from 'is'. I can aspire to be a pilot and still not be able to fly a plane; likewise I can predict with 'exactitude' the movements of the national economy, get it wrong, and still call myself an economist; and of course even if I still get it right I'd still be damned short of the level of predictive power that a physicist has. That's kind of the point: a science has predictive power; economics has next to none.

where does natural science get that precision and perfectibility that you are claiming for it? if you claim the predictive power of science to be so supreme and infallible, then we should assume there are no instances of natural science's predictions being ever proven wrong. and how correct would such an assumption be? how well does the work of Newton live up to modern scrutiny or for that matter the work of Charles Darwin or even Einstein. are there no plausible alternatives to the commonly held theories of Physics and chemistry and other natural sciences. how does economics not have predictive power: Friedman was able to predict the phenomenon of Stagflation; even in the case of Malthus, he was able to predict the Theory of Glut recognised by econmists only in the 20th century. Franco Modigliani and Milton Friedman were able, independently of eachother, to come up with A Theory of the Consumption Function. They came up with the theory by resorting to a methodology which is typical of natural scientists as pointed out by Krugman.

Who was Milton Frieman

For most of the past two centuries, economic thinking has been dominated by the concept of Homo economicus. The hypothetical Economic Man knows what he wants; his preferences can be expressed mathematically in terms of a “utility function.” And his choices are driven by rational calculations about how to maximize that function: whether consumers are deciding between corn flakes or shredded wheat, or investors are deciding between stocks and bonds, those decisions are assumed to be based on comparisons of the “marginal utility,” or the added benefit the buyer would get from acquiring a small amount of the alternatives available.

It’s easy to make fun of this story. Nobody, not even Nobel-winning economists, really makes decisions that way. But most economists—myself included—nonetheless find Economic Man useful, with the understanding that he’s an idealized representation of what we really think is going on. People do have preferences, even if those preferences can’t really be expressed by a precise utility function; they usually make sensible decisions, even if they don’t literally maximize utility. You might ask, why not represent people the way they really are? The answer is that abstraction, strategic simplification, is the only way we can impose some intellectual order on the complexity of economic life. And the assumption of rational behavior has been a particularly fruitful simplification.

The question, however, is how far to push it. Keynes didn’t make an all-out assault on Economic Man, but he often resorted to plausible psychological theorizing rather than careful analysis of what a rational decision-maker would do. Business decisions were driven by “animal spirits,” consumer decisions by a psychological tendency to spend some but not all of any increase in income, wage settlements by a sense of fairness, and so on.

But was it really a good idea to diminish the role of Economic Man that much? No, said Friedman, who argued in his 1953 essay “The Methodology of Positive Economics” that economic theories should be judged not by their psychological realism but by their ability to predict behavior. And Friedman’s two greatest triumphs as an economic theorist came from applying the hypothesis of rational behavior to questions other economists had thought beyond its reach.

In his 1957 book A Theory of the Consumption Function—not exactly a crowd-pleasing title, but an important topic—Friedman argued that the best way to make sense of saving and spending was not, as Keynes had done, to resort to loose psychological theorizing, but rather to think of individuals as making rational plans about how to spend their wealth over their lifetimes. This wasn’t necessarily an anti-Keynesian idea—in fact, the great Keynesian economist Franco Modigliani simultaneously and independently made a similar case, with even more care in thinking about rational behavior, in work with Albert Ando. But it did mark a return to classical ways of thinking—and it worked. The details are a bit technical, but Friedman’s “permanent income hypothesis” and the Ando-Modigliani “life cycle model” resolved several apparent paradoxes about the relationship between income and spending, and remain the foundations of how economists think about spending and saving to this day.

Friendman was right once; therefore Friendman was always right; therefore Friendman was a scientist; therefore economics is a science. That's not how it works I'm afraid. Were it the case that Friedman was always right in the first instance then we might make a viable claim. The sad truth however s that economics is seldom right. We are as a profession better at post-hoc analysis (which is useful) than we are at predictive work.

You might as well mock the perfectibility of natural science by saying that this natural scientist was right once; therefore he was always right; therefore there are no istances in human history of natural scientists ever being proven wrong.

Even more hilariously Friedman himself would have disagreed; he didn't see economics as a science on the contrary he opposed so-called 'scientific management' of the economy precisely because economics is so profoundly bad at it. The basic point of his writings is that the market is so damned complex that governments can't keep a handle on it or make better decisions, in aggregate, than the individual on the ground; a significant argument in its own right, in his opinion, for capitalism. .

And this is what was so wrong with Friedman, especially in his role as public intellectual. He unfortunately displayed the hints of pseudo intelectualism which the likes of Nial Ferguson have become so famous for. All in his quest to prove that Government was an evil; and free markets were infallible. Here is Krugman giving us an instance of this genius doing a disservice to his great intellect in that fashion:

On a more narrowly focused topic, one of Friedman’s key targets was what he considered the uselessness and counterproductive nature of most government regulation. In an obituary for his one-time collaborator George Stigler, Friedman singled out for praise Stigler’s critique of electricity regulation, and his argument that regulators usually end up serving the interests of the regulated rather than those of the public. So how has deregulation worked out?

It started well, with the deregulation of trucking and airlines beginning in the late 1970s. In both cases deregulation, while it didn’t make everyone happy, led to increased competition, generally lower prices, and higher efficiency. Deregulation of natural gas was also a success.

But the next big wave of deregulation, in the electricity sector, was a different story. Just as Japan’s slump in the 1990s showed that Keynesian worries about the effectiveness of monetary policy were no myth, the California electricity crisis of 2000– 2001—in which power companies and energy traders created an artificial shortage to drive up prices—reminded us of the reality that lay behind tales of the robber barons and their depredations. While other states didn’t suffer as severely as California, across the nation electricity deregulation led to higher, not lower, prices, with huge windfall profits for power companies.

Those states that, for whatever reason, didn’t get on the deregulation bandwagon in the 1990s now consider themselves lucky. And the luckiest of all are those cities that somehow didn’t get the memo about the evils of government and the virtues of the private sector, and still have publicly owned power companies. All of this showed that the original rationale for electricity regulation—the observation that without regulation, power companies would have too much monopoly power—remains as valid as ever.

Should we conclude from this that deregulation is always a bad idea? No—it depends on the specifics. To conclude that deregulation is always and everywhere a bad idea would be to engage in the same kind of absolutist thinking that was, arguably, Milton Friedman’s greatest flaw.


And we must point out it is this absurd mistrust of government which has led to the wave of dergulation in th Financial markets responsible forthe financial crisis engulfing the world even as we speak.

Sure, go for it. I'm fourteen nil at this stage.



For the same reason that I listen to my doctor seriously and not a homoeopath. I guess I like science

Do you really take this to be some silly game of arithmetic? If am able to get one economist who claims economics is a science, that ought to be sufficient. the only problem here is your dogmatic definition of what science is or the absurd idea that the objectivity of natural science is superior to all else. I dont care if you are an economists, with all due respect, that is not a shield big enough to protect your own intelletual bigotry on this issue. Here is Adam Ozimec defending the idea of Economics as a science against the bigotry which you cling so well to:

A final and related point I want to make is that macroeconomics is both science and engineering, as Greg Mankiw has argued in a paper that should be read (it’s very light reading, seriously) if you’re interested in delineating between the scientific and un-scientific parts of macro. Economics is also history, and moral philosophy, and contains many individual studies which in-and-of-themselves are not scientific. But economics as a field is a science in that all claims about reality must ultimately be rooted in empiricism, and models and paradigms must be falsifiable and eventually tested against reality.

It can oftentimes be difficult to see the scientific process at work in economics, as in other fields. Sometimes we are stuck at impasses where we are left with little more than theory to guide us, and sometimes empiricism is limited to testing particular model parameters, and ultimately our confidence should be limited by this. And sometimes what looks like pointless or tautological theorizing is really theorists attempting to build tools and lay groundwork for empiricists. It’s easy to look at some of this and think it un-scientific, but not all steps of the scientific process look like science.

Another question is, if economics weren’t a science, then would previous paradigms so have been done in by empirical outcomes? The old Keynesian Phillips Curve held that there was a tradeoff between inflation and unemployment. When that relationship broke down during the stagflation of the 70s, the Phillips Curve was invalidated, and this helped shift macro away from old Keynesianism and towards the new classical paradigm. Real Business Cycle models of the 80s were also invalidated by reality: it was clear that money mattered, and in the real world it was hard to find technology shocks to explain actual recessions.

Beyond this point I really donot care if you accept the argument that Economics is a science. I have no desire to engage in the silly and juvenile arithmetic contest you seem so hellbent on winning. Let readers decide which argument is more reasonable.

 

[Leoreth]

Let readers decide which argument is more reasonable.

Just stepping in to say that his is.

 

[ParkCungHee]

If am able to get one economist who claims economics is a science, that ought to be sufficient.

If I can get one economist who claims economics is a fruit, that also ought to be sufficient.

 

[Lord Baal]

If I can get one economist who claims economics is a fruit, that also ought to be sufficient.

I literally just snorted some coke out of my nose upon reading that. Also, what Leoreth said.

 

[Masada]

How does Furedi agree with you? he simply points out that the ulterior motive behind Malthus' theory was to oppose the the optimistic humanitarianism of his contemporaries. In other words, He mobilized the arguments about the dangers of population growth as weapons in his battle of ideas against social reform. (.

At this point: 'He argued that welfare measures like the English Poor Laws merely intensified impoverishment, since they allowed the poor to breed more'. Which would seem to suggest that Malthus' motives were humane, which is rather different from saying that Malthus simply did it because he hated people; which Furedi doesn't even seem to suggest.

your point?

Where did i ever say he endorsed genocide. I simply point out that he was an ispiration for these antihuman beliefs, even now with the advent of neo-malthusianism.

You've accused him flat-out of prefiguring eugenics, anticipating Hitler and being a god-awful Monster, genocide doesn't seem to be that big a step.

where does natural science get that precision and perfectibility that you are claiming for it? if you claim the predictive power of science to be so supreme and infallible, then we should assume there are no instances of natural science's predictions being ever proven wrong. and how correct would such an assumption be? how well does the work of Newton live up to modern scrutiny or for that matter the work of Charles Darwin or even Einstein. are there no plausible alternatives to the commonly held theories of Physics and chemistry and other natural sciences.

Science advances. Gosh, that shafts me right? Not in the least. Even flawed like Newton's Laws of Motion still has more predictive power than the whole of economics. I can use Newton to figure out the velocity of a given falling apple with near perfection. I can't even use economics to predict tomorrow let alone a year in the future; if I could I'd be a rather rich individual.

how does economics not have predictive power: Friedman was able to predict the phenomenon of Stagflation; even in the case of Malthus, he was able to predict the Theory of Glut recognised by econmists only in the 20th century. Franco Modigliani and Milton Friedman were able, independently of eachother, to come up with A Theory of the Consumption Function. They came up with the theory by resorting to a methodology which is typical of natural scientists as pointed out by Krugman.

We've been over this. But I'll have another shot. Friedman made a single prediction that happened to be right, which he could explain with reference to his data. Good on him. That's a coup in economic. And that's the problem: it was a coup. Economics seldom get it right. For a litmus test go have a look at the predictions before and after the Global Financial Crisis on the IMF's website; you'll note that there was a dramatic amount of back-peddling. So much for predictive power. As to consumption functions, I'll note the use of typical of natural sciences.

You might as well mock the perfectibility of natural science by saying that this natural scientist was right once; therefore he was always right; therefore there are no istances in human history of natural scientists ever being proven wrong.

I'm sure there's lots. That doesn't change the fact that economics still has less predictive power than the natural sciences even allowing for them.

And this is what was so wrong with Friedman, especially in his role as public intellectual. He unfortunately displayed the hints of pseudo intelectualism which the likes of Nial Ferguson have become so famous for. All in his quest to prove that Government was an evil; and free markets were infallible. Here is Krugman giving us an instance of this genius doing a disservice to his great intellect in that fashion:

So Friedman is right? Except when he isn't

Do you really take this to be some silly game of arithmetic? If am able to get one economist who claims economics is a science, that ought to be sufficient.

Nope. See: fruit.

the only problem here is your dogmatic definition of what science is or the absurd idea that the objectivity of natural science is superior to all else.

Strawman much? I haven't used objective once because it isn't in the least relevant. Economists do try to be objective, much like historians do. The problem economists have isn't that we're not objective but that objectivity on its own isn't worth much. Prediction and falsifiability are marks of a science. Economics does the first poorly and can't do the second.

 

[mghani]

If I can get one economist who claims economics is a fruit, that also ought to be sufficient.

I will not dare respond to your formidable logic. I give up; you win! Your deadly and efficient intellect is a challenge I can only dream of mastering.

 

[Lord Baal]

I will not dare respond to your formidable logic. I give up; you win! Your deadly and efficient intellect is a challenge I can only dream of mastering.

His one sentence is more logical than anything you've typed in this thread, actually, and completely tears apart your argument.

 

[mghani]

At this point: 'He argued that welfare measures like the English Poor Laws merely intensified impoverishment, since they allowed the poor to breed more'. Which would seem to suggest that Malthus' motives were humane, which is rather different from saying that Malthus simply did it because he hated people; which Furedi doesn't even seem to suggest.





You've accused him flat-out of prefiguring eugenics, anticipating Hitler and being a god-awful Monster, genocide doesn't seem to be that big a step.



Science advances. Gosh, that shafts me right? Not in the least. Even flawed like Newton's Laws of Motion still has more predictive power than the whole of economics. I can use Newton to figure out the velocity of a given falling apple with near perfection. I can't even use economics to predict tomorrow let alone a year in the future; if I could I'd be a rather rich individual.



We've been over this. But I'll have another shot. Friedman made a single prediction that happened to be right, which he could explain with reference to his data. Good on him. That's a coup in economic. And that's the problem: it was a coup. Economics seldom get it right. For a litmus test go have a look at the predictions before and after the Global Financial Crisis on the IMF's website; you'll note that there was a dramatic amount of back-peddling. So much for predictive power. As to consumption functions, I'll note the use of typical of natural sciences.



I'm sure there's lots. That doesn't change the fact that economics still has less predictive power than the natural sciences even allowing for them.



So Friedman is right? Except when he isn't



Nope. See: fruit.



Strawman much? I haven't used objective once because it isn't in the least relevant. Economists do try to be objective, much like historians do. The problem economists have isn't that we're not objective but that objectivity on its own isn't worth much. Prediction and falsifiability are marks of a science. Economics does the first poorly and can't do the second.

As I said earlier am done, here. That deadly sentence by PCH really slaughtered me. Sometimes a man just needs to be man enough to admit that he is not man enough. But I appreciate the two votes though.

 

[Lone Wolf]

Hey, stop gangbanging on the poster!

 

[mghani]

His one sentence is more logical than anything you've typed in this thread, actually, and completely tears apart your argument.

Which is my point! The realization of that awful reality is more than i can bear! And so hence the reason I am fleeing, with my tail between my legs and my heart broken to pieces. I am even seriously considering never starting a thread on Civfanatics again----so disastrous is my sense of defeat. Is this what the Indonesians felt like when the Tsunami hit?

 

[Masada]

As I said earlier am done, here. That deadly sentence by PCH really slaughtered me. Sometimes a man just needs to be man enough to admit that he is not man enough. But I appreciate the two votes though.

The easier option would be to just engage meaningfully with the points I've raised?

 

[mghani]

The easier option would be to just engage meaningfully with the points I've raised?

Masada I sincerely appreciate your vigorous engagement, but I pass. Your points have been raised and reraised. This is getting to be a vicious circle!

 

[Lord Baal]

Masada I sincerely appreciate your vigorous engagement, but I pass. Your points have been raised and reraised. This is getting to be a vicious circle!

You know, when you claim you're done with an argument, then come back to continue making sarcastic trolling comments, it shows that you lost the argument, rather than just left it because you were 'bored' of it, or sick and tired that it had become a "vicious circle." The only reason this argument became circular was your use of circular logic. 'This is correct because of what this other thing says, and that other thing is correct because it says what the first thing says.' That isn't logic, and it isn't proper argumentation. It's lazy, piss-poor argumentation without an ouncce of proper scholarship.

You're running away from this argument because Masada rightly trounced you, which isn't much of a surprise; he's a frigging economist, one would suspect he knows whether or not economics is a science. Even PCH completely destroyed one of your arguments, with a single sentence; science requires repeatability, and your claim that you only needed a single economist to say economics was a science to prove economics was a science is in itself, highly unscientific.

Congratulation: in one single thread you've destroyed any chance of yourself ever being taken seriously in the World History forum, and you did it despite being given numerous chances to back down. Instead, you're running away like a little boy who's embarrassed himself in front of the bigger kids.

 

[Plotinus]

Moderator Action: I think it's safe to say that nothing constructive is going to happen in this thread. Closed.