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Politics : Ask Michael Burke -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: BGR who wrote (60879)	5/27/1999 10:58:00 AM
From: Knighty Tin	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 132070

BGR, Nope. One can form opinions about even harder science by using his noggin. For example, it doesn't matter how many academic journals claimed Thalidomide was the second coming, once it started producing babies with horrible birth defects, the journals were no longer relevant. The same with economics, though more so, as it is a pseudo science. When the theories are applied and they fall on their face, you don't need to scan the model with much precision.

To: BGR who wrote (60879)	5/27/1999 12:12:00 PM
From: Tommaso	Respond to of 132070

>> One has to read the original papers published in academic journals.<< Better than that is to examine the data on which economists base their arguments. This holds true in any field. It is better to read Joyce's Ulysses for oneself than to read an academic paper about it, and it is better to collect data on variable stars than to read papers about the data (although in this case the theoretical accounting for light curves does require mathematical physics beyond the reach of some observers). Many contributors to this thread are better informed than economists who publish papers. I talk regularly with an academic economist who is a Hayek specialist--indeed edits some of Hayek's work for the University of Chicago Press. He is somewhat out of touch with economic immediacies--did not know what M3 signified, for example. Like the historian in Thomas Mann's "Disorder and Early Sorrow" who is buried in the past and understands nothing of the history that he is in the middle of--the Weimar republic. There are numerous supposed literary scholars whose ideas bear little relation to the texts they write about; indeed, some argue that the text itself is irrelevant except as it provides an occasion for criticism. In reading the academic scholarship in various fields, I have repeatedly arrived at a state that I call "studying myself into stupidity." Economics is a field in which it is especially easy to do this.