The curious task of economics is to demonstrate to men how little they really know about what they imagine they can design. – F.A. Hayek
Posted in Methodology on Mar 26th, 2012
I’ve suggested to folks that perhaps the best way to improve health outcomes in America is to improve American education. Empirically we know that better educated people have better health outcomes and it is not hard to imagine why. That sounds all well and good. However, today we learn the process works the other way [...]
Posted in Extended Order, Methodology on Mar 20th, 2012
It required me to revisit the debates (actually, did they ever really have debates, or do we just debate their ideas today?) between the French Rationalist thinkers with the Scottish Evolutionary thinkers. The Scottish thinkers understood the value of tradition and urged us to be humble when it came to the following of rules, most [...]
Posted in Classical Liberalism, Methodology, You Can't Have it Both Ways on Mar 17th, 2012
From an essay by Peter Kreeft on Progressivism: Thus chronological snobbery is the identification, or confusion, of “change” with “progress.” “Progress” is a value-laden term: it means not just change but change in a certain direction, change for the better. It is like a graph in geometry that charts the movement of some entity (a [...]
Posted in Methodology on Mar 16th, 2012
Economists like to model everything. Open up any issue of the American Economic Review and you will find all kinds of fancy expositions on optimal interventions in markets with adverse selection, the effects of housing assistance on labor supply, whether union militancy can promote economic growth, models of credit constraints, models of persuasion, currency misalignments [...]
Posted in Methodology, media on Mar 15th, 2012
Via Brookings: Notice the direction of the trend lines and when the inflection points happen.
Posted in Methodology on Mar 6th, 2012
Don’t ask me why, but I’ve started downloading and reading a selection of scientific papers on various aspects of the global warming science. I’ve lately been perusing papers that discuss the methods used to reconstruct historical temperature series. We do not obviously have thermometer readings from the past (more than 150 years ago) and so [...]
Posted in Methodology on Feb 27th, 2012
I wrote recently, with much disgust (which I will not redact), about the use of symbolism. The implicit message which should have been made explicit, is that relying on symbolism to “run” an extended order will destroy it. But to coin a presidential phrase, let me be clear on what else I see in symbolism: [...]
Posted in Methodology on Feb 25th, 2012
Makes sense when Richard Epstein is discussing the Rule of Law. But have a look at this: a crowdsourced effort to look at all of the factors that influence climate. The point is NOT that humans and CO2 cannot and have not had an effect, quite the contrary.
Posted in Methodology on Feb 9th, 2012
This is a modern brand of scientism. It’s the hybrid of Hayek’s epistemological criticism of social scientists dressing up their work in the language and tools of the hard sciences (actually, it’s more apt to say that studies of a complex order using the tools to study simple orders) and the complete politicization and self-delusion [...]
Posted in Methodology, You Can't Have it Both Ways on Jan 30th, 2012
I am sure those of you who defend markets based on the logic of supply and demand or on the logic of trade and comparative advantage have encountered this reaction. I get this regularly of course, even after I move from the models to dramatic illustrations of how they have worked in practice and even [...]
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