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Politics : Foreign Affairs Discussion Group -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Ilaine who wrote (60331)	12/8/2002 4:35:56 AM
From: Dayuhan	Respond to of 281500

I was talking about formal economics, which requires mathematical modeling. Which, of course, requires a lot of assumptions and oversimplifications. Unfortunately, the assumptions and oversimplifications usually expand so dramatically that the completed model does not apply to any universe outside that of the computer doing the calculations. This of course renders the modeling exercise only marginally relevant, at best, to any real-world circumstance. I’ve always thought that economists need to study more history. they attempt to model the effect of absolutist monarchies vs. all other forms of government on the economies of various European countries and city-states circa 1000-1850. There appears to be a strong correlation between absolutist monarchies and shrinking of populations, presumably because the citizens leave and go somewhere else that has more lenient forms of government. That’s a big presumption. Hard to challenge the logic without seeing it, but what strikes me at first glance is that for most of that period there were no “other forms of govrernment”, absolutist monarchies having been pretty much the order of the day. There were also quite formidable barriers to economic migration. Have the models convincingly demonstrated that population decrease was caused by outmigration, rather than war, disease, and other factors quite common in those days? The whole topic seems more the province of the historian than of the mathematical modeler. I’d be interested in seeing the specifics of the argument. I think economists have a lot of fun with emerging economies because they get to test their theories in the real world, not just on paper. Very true: economists are allowed to impose policies in developing nations that no developed democracy would dream of accepting. The economists may have had fun with these laboratory exercises; the populations of the nations in question have often found the consequences, many of which were not predicted by mathematical models, to be something short of amusing.