EPT
. The European Debt Crisis and the Euro - Page 154
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Sbrubbles
Brazil5776 Posts
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JonnyBNoHo
United States6277 Posts
On September 04 2014 11:50 bookwyrm wrote: But now your claim is that things totally changed, they are unrelated to things before and so we don't have to think about them, but now we are in the modern period which is the end of history. + Show Spoiler + How can you possibly justify the claim that no cycles' (if indeed cycle is the correct metaphor) longer than 40 years matter for economics as anything other than an a priori dogma? I don't even know what this supposed technological cycle is. You claim that economics can't look at anything other than recent history, and then that economics shows that nothing except recent history matters?!?!? Talk about begging the question the modern break is a myth, homo oeconomicus is a myth... the world now is totally different from the 30s, but you can only understand that difference by going back even further and really thinking in the long term. I'm sorry if there's no data, that's not an excuse not to think about it. We are not as different and special and modern as you think we are, and whatever we are, we won't continue to be it. There are no equilibria- there is only the storm blowing from heaven! but you will all continue to think in this way i guess until the storm really arrives, and then it will be too late for talking you should check out a book called 'the great wave' it is about price revolutions which are extremely long term economic phenomena which take place over hundreds of years. By a guy called fischer. It's a really interesting book. Economists do think about how economies worked in the past and how they may work in the future. As far as modern econ goes though, those things are only tangentially related. Economies worked differently prior to modern economic 'revolutions'. I can explain some of the differences in greater detail if you need. And for those reasons you can't just take something like Fischer's book and actually apply it to today. Too much has changed. | ||
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bookwyrm
United States722 Posts
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bookwyrm
United States722 Posts
On September 04 2014 12:34 Sbrubbles wrote: I wouldn't hold my breath if I were you . I still want you to explain how a field which limits itself to the 20th century proves that nothing outside the 20th century matters to it I was hoping you had a response to me because I thought I raised a very interesting point  oh well | ||
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Sbrubbles
Brazil5776 Posts
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bookwyrm
United States722 Posts
you claim that there are no long term cycles. You claim this is proved by economics, which you also claim doesn't study the long term because there is no data. Your reasoning is entirely circular... admit it! also... i don't know how you could be paying attention to the world and feel that things are not going very very badly. It's just oblivious. I think it's hard to take YOU seriously because you think that crisis is some sort of a priori impossibility. Unless.... don't tell me... economics has proved that nothing bad can happen because nothing bad happened in the 20th century | ||
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JonnyBNoHo
United States6277 Posts
On September 04 2014 12:43 bookwyrm wrote: Don't pretend like you've read fischer's book, 'today' falls within its scope. Why do I even talk to you I didn't read the book. I looked at some reviews and some slides on it. It's a pretty easy book to understand and while it does have some applicability to today, it has a lot of limitations too. For example, a few hundred years ago most economic activity was agricultural. So if your population grew you'd need more land, which meant using crummier fields, which mean output per worker fell, which meant lower wages / inflation, social instability, etc. Today it's a bit different. Yes, a growing world population can lead to resource pressures, and so his book has some relevance, but those pressures represent just a small fraction of output and so they are not nearly as significant as they once were. | ||
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bookwyrm
United States722 Posts
This conversation is taking a toll on my blood pressure and people wont even respond to my points or attempt to support their dogmatic claims about how history doesn't exist. Im glad you guys are so confident that things are going great... i hope yoire right but i know you arent. Bye for now | ||
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JonnyBNoHo
United States6277 Posts
On September 04 2014 12:46 bookwyrm wrote: I still want you to explain how a field which limits itself to the 20th century proves that nothing outside the 20th century matters to it I was hoping you had a response to me because I thought I raised a very interesting point oh wellEcon doesn't limit itself to the 20th century. Econ mostly focuses on post-WW2 because the data is richer and more relevant. | ||
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bookwyrm
United States722 Posts
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aksfjh
United States4853 Posts
In general, not many serious economists think that we're going to ALWAYS experience what we have since the late 19th century, and at some point normal policy reactions won't cut it. It's going to take a lot of evidence to prove that though. | ||
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Sbrubbles
Brazil5776 Posts
On September 04 2014 13:04 bookwyrm wrote: Answer the question! you claim that there are no long term cycles. You claim this is proved by economics, which you also claim doesn't study the long term because there is no data. Your reasoning is entirely circular... admit it! also... i don't know how you could be paying attention to the world and feel that things are not going very very badly. It's just oblivious. I think it's hard to take YOU seriously because you think that crisis is some sort of a priori impossibility. Unless.... don't tell me... economics has proved that nothing bad can happen because nothing bad happened in the 20th century Economics does have answers to today s problems even if economists dont fully agree on them. Youre the onde whos claiming otherwise remember? The snale oil and all that? As for the existance of longer term cycles let's just leave it that im a skeptic considering the short term nature of economic interactions (even long term investment projects rarely look beyond 30 years). But no im unable to prove a priori they dont exist much as im unable to prove god doesnt exist (bad example but im feeling lazy). I claim absence of evidence but not evidence of absence. Happy? | ||
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Sub40APM
6336 Posts
On September 04 2014 11:50 bookwyrm wrote: How can you possibly justify the claim that no cycles' (if indeed cycle is the correct metaphor) longer than 40 years matter for economics as anything other than an a priori dogma? I don't even know what this supposed technological cycle is. You claim that economics can't look at anything other than recent history, and then that economics shows that nothing except recent history matters?!?!? Talk about begging the question Its not dogma, using the best historical estimates available and doing relatively fudgy things like looking at the caloric intake of an average worker we roughly know that absent exogenous things like mass deaths of laborers economic growth per capita was relatively stable until the 18th century when suddenly productivity in Britain and then the rest of the West started to rise. Gregory Clark's A Farewell to Alms tries to trace this out. On page 41 for example he has a graph of English wage and farm labor real wages that traces both its decline prior to the black death and its rise when the black death led to the relative decimation of labor -- and thus increased the surviving laborers bargaining power But like you said, you are already angry, you dont need to know anything outside of the writing of a few heterodox non-economists and you believe what you believe so why change your mind. YOU GOT PASSION. AND ITS ALL DOOM. | ||
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JonnyBNoHo
United States6277 Posts
On September 04 2014 13:04 bookwyrm wrote: Answer the question! you claim that there are no long term cycles. You claim this is proved by economics, which you also claim doesn't study the long term because there is no data. Your reasoning is entirely circular... admit it! + Show Spoiler + also... i don't know how you could be paying attention to the world and feel that things are not going very very badly. It's just oblivious. I think it's hard to take YOU seriously because you think that crisis is some sort of a priori impossibility. Unless.... don't tell me... economics has proved that nothing bad can happen because nothing bad happened in the 20th century If you look at what long term data we have, economic periods prior to various economic revolutions (industrial revolutions, green revolutions, etc.) behaved very differently from the modern era. If you want me to show you some data examples of this I can, so ask. Because of those differences, in addition to data quality issues, we do not use the really old data for making modern predictions. It's not because of dogma, it's because the old data lost relevance. edit: Its not dogma, using the best historical estimates available and doing relatively fudgy things like looking at the caloric intake of an average worker we roughly know that absent exogenous things like mass deaths of laborers economic growth per capita was relatively stable until the 18th century ^ exactly this. And it's largely because of that per capita stagnation that those 'long trends' took place. And it's because of the end of the per capita stagnation that the long trends have lost relevance. | ||
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IgnE
United States7681 Posts
On September 04 2014 13:42 Sub40APM wrote: Its not dogma, using the best historical estimates available and doing relatively fudgy things like looking at the caloric intake of an average worker we roughly know that absent exogenous things like mass deaths of laborers economic growth per capita was relatively stable until the 18th century when suddenly productivity in Britain and then the rest of the West started to rise. Gregory Clark's A Farewell to Alms tries to trace this out. On page 41 for example he has a graph of English wage and farm labor real wages that traces both its decline prior to the black death and its rise when the black death led to the relative decimation of labor -- and thus increased the surviving laborers bargaining power But like you said, you are already angry, you dont need to know anything outside of the writing of a few heterodox non-economists and you believe what you believe so why change your mind. YOU GOT PASSION. AND ITS ALL DOOM. If you want even more interesting historical economics, there's evidence that a similar thing happened when the black death showed up for the first time in written history in the 6th century AD, decimating much of the Byzantine and Sasanian empires, from the Balkans to Iran. The price of labor in the cities went up so much that Justinian actually decreed a "fair price" for labor that the patricians of course ignored because they couldn't find enough laborers. | ||
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aksfjh
United States4853 Posts
Original Message From bookwyrm: Years of inflationary stimulus to the tune of billions a month with absolutely nothing to show for it isn't enough for you? Years of a liquidity trap mixed with contractionary fiscal policy. The US has something to show for it, granted it's not much, but that's due, in part, to the fiscal cuts and congressional dysfunction. EU has been going in the wrong direction too much. Contractionary fiscal policy, botched monetary policy for a number of years. What's happening to them is textbook stuff. | ||
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bookwyrm
United States722 Posts
i still think you guys (and krugman) don't lmow how to think historically. And sub40APM has prompted me to think of a very interesting distinction between 'using historical examples' and 'thinking historically' which are two totally opposed things. I'm really going to think about that edit: see what I don't believe is that if somehow the democrats had power and they could deficit spend to their hearts content that this would fix the problem.. i don't think it's just an issue of deficit spending until the economy restarts and you pay off the debt from deficits (or failing that some sort of other desperate inflationary stimulus, since QE is just sort of a desperate substitute for actual Keynesian stimulus). I think the issue is deeper than that. Can I prove it? No. Can you prove I'm wrong? No. At that point you just have to try to think qualitatively about your historical situation. Which I don't think is 'textbook stuff' as if there were any such thing. But that narrative is just too easy. As far as I can tell the ECB joining Japan and the US in the fake economy punch bowl party is just the spread of the contagion. But who knows in 5 years maybe we'll all be living through the new Belle epoque thanks to central bank magic! But y'all 's confidence in the powers that be and the Official Wisdom really does astound me. I don't see how you can maintain that kind of faith after everything we've been through. I guess this is how institutions and systems maintain themselves though.... the inertia of Belief if you guys want to understand the damaging effects of Keynesian stimulus just go read about the history if water management in the American west. Cash-register dams. Solving your problem by getting some huge government bureaucracy, captured by special interests, to spend a bunch of money is NOT the way to do it. The right is correct - governments are really not very efficient ways to do stuff. Instead of thinking about how to get the government to have welfare and stuff you should think about how to make a society where you don't need welfare. Which means rethinking the entire thing. We need an anti - Keynesian Left.. and I don't have to go get a degree in mainstream economics to have that be an eminently reasonable position. sub40APM - contra the eminent and cruelly maligned mr. Krugman, the thing to do in a crisis is NOT to restart the machine for a little while longer. What you do in a crisis is think radically. Otherwise you will only just hold off the same crisis for a little while longer edit: and please. Don't think it's personal about Mr krugman. It's not his fault he's Paul krugman. If he weren't, somebody else would be | ||
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bookwyrm
United States722 Posts
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radiatoren
Denmark1907 Posts
When things are changing in a model sense it could mean that there has been so much of a change in the different effects that another kind of mathematical interpretation is better suited. I would look at societal changes based on improvements getting implemented and the differences between services (finance, education, advicing etc,), industry (from plumbing to production of microprocessors) and agriculture or other groupings of the participants in the economy for that kind of change. The worst thing in a non-cabal context of history would be to generalize too much and predict based on gut-feeling and the past instead of data. Just learning from history and acting different than the past is not the same as acting correct or even better. | ||
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bookwyrm
United States722 Posts
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