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Politics : View from the Center and Left -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Paul Smith who wrote (141935)	8/2/2010 10:26:34 PM
From: Mary Cluney	Respond to of 541853

<<<James Buchanan, Edward Prescott, Vernon Smith, and Gary Becker, all Nobel laureates in economics, argued that while the stimulus might be an important emergency measure, it would fail to improve economic performance. Nobel laureates Paul Krugman and Joseph Stiglitz, on the other hand, argued that the stimulus would improve the economy and indeed that it should be bigger. >>> They all seem to agree that there should be a stimulus, a fiscal response. The argument seems to be about the ROI. Like how much would it cost to save 2 or 5 milion jobs. Yeah its more complex than a moon shot. Big deal.

To: Paul Smith who wrote (141935)	8/3/2010 2:45:43 PM
From: JohnM	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 541853

Nicely written piece by Manzi. Anyone interested in this point of view, might be interested to know who Manzi is. en.wikipedia.org. The short of it is that he writes for, among other places, The National Review, The Weekly Standard, The Atlantic Monthly, etc. The first two require conservative credentials to gain entry. Which doesn't make his arguments wrong; just helps interpret them. The problem is that he takes a narrow view of scientific epistemology and then judges the "social sciences" by that standard. I frankly don't know of any serious sociologist who would argue that controlled experimentation is possible at the macro level. And I would expect to same to be true of economists (just don't know that tribe as well). And the macro level is the one at which most governmental policy proposals reside. If you were to take a look at the genuinely serious literature in this subject, you would find that multivariate analysis is not only ubiquitous but terribly, terribly sophisticated. And that multivariate work is written into the modeling process in both disciplines. Are the results of such work likely to ever be as predictable as some of the hard sciences? Of course not. No end of reasons why not--reflexive human action not the least. But is the result of that analysis better than prejudices, blind luck, common sense, whatever? Of course. Much, much better.