anyway the fact that he does not disclose the results of all his funds are interesting

cheers

It's a great review, in my opinion. Falkenstein's one of the best blogging nowadays, since he's not actually doing it for status yet has worked a long time with the topics he writes about it.

Donna

I have read the black swan, and I'm very interested in a good critique. Link(s)? (please)

To shoehorn into the topic of the thread, public discourse is bound to become more quantitatively-oriented as we find stuff out, but that doesn't necessarily imply permanent domination by economists as other social sciences learn to use numbers.

But as it is, I'm appalled and disappointed to see how philosophically easy you are making this picture and conclusion for yourself. With “the discount rate should approach infinity as we consider the welfare of future beings with whom there is no possibility of reciprocity”, and “if we’re doing something now that might hurt people none of us will coexist with 100 years, then so what?”, you simply shrug at the whole question of whether an outcome might possibly be bad. “Future beings” seem to be like people who are in another other dimension, which we can affect but which cannot ever affect us – where you are saying it would be morally meaningless, and only advantageous to us, if by deriving economically useful particles from their world we removed the oxygen from its atmosphere or afflicted its people with a disease. A difference is that, unless we go extinct by the time the people you care about die, the “future beings” are not hypothetical – they are absolutely certain to be real and be there. And you shrug at the idea that we might perhaps affect them badly or reduce their options or… whatever. If we did – if history should go badly – it's nothing to you. (After all, you've read philosophical arguments.)

You are arguing here from lack of interest, taking it as a significant premise and challenging anyone to stir you from it. I have never taken libertarianism, or good economic thinking or good philosophical thinking, to require such a thing or to stem from such a thing. You should revisit this picture and see how it looks if you don't lean so comfortably on easily absolute assumptions. If you have a reason. I expected better. But my previous readings of you didn't include this sort of emotional okayness with lack of concern.

Saying that economists can and should attempt particular calculations is not the same thing as saying economists are subsequently uniquely qualified to prioritize certain costs and benefits. No one could do that, unless we all had the same preferences. But making our best possible predictions is better than going in blind, so long as those who rely on economists' work realize that human predictions are not prophecies.

Thinking for yourself is hard and stuff.

People listen to economists because they have something rigorous to say about normative political decisions. This idea that economists were collectively wrong about the financial crisis, so they now are more than useless, is a fashionable yet stupid one. Eric Falkenstein has made the point, in my opinion, that even though economists have had predicted little, our political overlords have had a much worse track record. We're still talking in the broadest strokes, at the highest levels of our government, about the dangers of “deregulation” and “too much CDS”, which under closer scrutiny have revealed themselves to be terrible explanations for the crisis. Who else acts as economists do, who else isn't reasoning with undefined assumptions and most of the time explicitly political rhetoric? You can still say, “THIS IS FOR THE CHILDREN”, in this modern era, with no other caveats at all, and people will listen to you. If society has a well-defined framework to work within, society can make better decisions. Reasoning without models and mathematics gave us Marx and the Misesian School of Austrian Economics. I'll take my chances with the beleaguered pointy-headed fellows.