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Politics : A US National Health Care System? -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: J_F_Shepard who wrote (16169)	4/6/2010 1:39:07 AM
From: TimF	3 Recommendations Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 42652

You seem to be mistaking "I can point out someone else who agrees with me" for presenting a real argument.

To: J_F_Shepard who wrote (16169)	4/6/2010 8:38:30 AM
From: Peter Dierks	Respond to of 42652

Continued Ad Hominem attacks as a substitute for discourse will result in a time out. I often don't agree with Lane3, but she generally makes well reasoned arguments. She often cites well documented authoritative sources.

To: J_F_Shepard who wrote (16169)	4/6/2010 12:38:13 PM
From: Lane3	1 Recommendation Respond to of 42652

An expert has not been cited but rather a collection of experts with models or data to back themselves up...... The authority you cited was an excellent one, one I respect. But the opinion of that authority took was off point. So that left you naked waving the flag of the authority. Nothing to back it up. If common sense is on your side, it should be simple to show how... I thought I did show how. That's what I do, offer rationales. If my logic is flawed, then point out the flaws if you have the wherewithal to do so. Blowing off a reasoned argument as "jaundiced opinion" is a loser's playground tactic. (Note that I refrained from using an analogy. <g>) all the bible thumpers talk about common sense...are you in that class? They do? My sense of bible thumpers is that they are the ultimate in appeals to authority, common sense be damned. What rationale do you have for your assessment? <g>

To: J_F_Shepard who wrote (16169)	4/6/2010 6:32:43 PM
From: TimF	2 Recommendations Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 42652

collection of experts with models or data to back themselves up Models and Hunches Arnold Kling I am possibly going to speak on a panel in a few weeks on the issue of U.S. unemployment. I am thinking of trying to convey two ideas (is that too many? I only have ten minutes). 1. Do not trust anyone who answers the question, "How many jobs will (or did) policy X create?" If economic models were as reliable as decision-makers wanted them to be, we would not be where we are today. 2. Policy going forward will necessarily be based on hunches. Keynes' hunch was that there was too much saving. This was part of his general antipathy toward Victorian values. My hunch is that the recovery depends on profits. This is part of my general antipathy toward firms that raise funds from capital markets rather than from sales to customers (I had a front-row seat during the Internet bubble, when going public without profits was the standard business model). I will elaborate a bit below. 1. Models and Delusions Early in my career, I worked on econometric forecasting models at the Federal Reserve Board. I became very disillusioned with the reliability of those models. I still do not believe that we can use econometrics to answer important questions in macroeconomics. I should point out that the models that claim to estimate that the stimulus helped to increase employment are the same models that forecast that by now unemployment would be under 7.5 percent an falling. The next step in my career was to work at Freddie Mac on models to forecast house price defaults. I think that those models were useful, but decision-makers did not want to hear how uncertain we were about our results. I remember when my boss and his managers had our first meeting with the Chief Operating Officer, and the COO asked us about the accuracy of our estimates of likely default costs in multifamily. At the time, I was young and naive, so I blurted out an honest answer. I said, "factor of 2." "Do you mean 2 basis points?" asked the COO. That would have meant that if we said expected default costs were 50 basis points, the right answer was between 48 and 52 basis points. "No," I replied. "I mean that if we estimate 50 basis points, the answer could be anywhere from 25 basis points to 100 basis points." The COO became so incensed at my seeming flippancy that when we left we thought that he was going to fire all of us by the next day. Fortunately, that did not happen. Years later, I can see that communication about the uncertainty in model estimates was not so blunt. If it had been, then nobody would have been convinced that you could create so much AAA paper out of subprime mortgages, or that regulators could allow the kind of leverage that they did at banks, which presumed narrow margin of error in estimates of mortgage defaults... econlog.econlib.org