william the wie
Gold Member
- Nov 18, 2009
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I see a lot of people whose opinions I respect quoting Keynes, Friedman, Hayek and others in posts on here in the economics forum. Just like with Newton and Galileo the errors of these men was caused by a lack of data that no one realized was needed until a new hypothesis was proposed. Since such men died or retired from active research several errors in their various models have been discovered and no one has yet fashioned a new economic model with fewer and more subtle errors. So a quick survey of some of those errors.
Monetary policy. Friedman got his Nobel memorial by showing the harm caused by the 1927-33 deflation, while Hayek got his by showing that the deflation Friedman denounced was caused by the inflation of 1921-6. Keynes demonstrated no knowledge of how the money supply worked (he simply proposed a refutable general theory as a guide to policy and research) and more or less accepted the earlier Fisher model as right. Despite refutations by both Hayek and Friedman the Fed, Congress and most administrations are still running with the Fisher model.
Economic man. The Adam Smith model of economic man was disproved by biologists in the 1960s and this refutation was popularized by Dawkins in "The Selfish Gene" in 1976. This spawned behavioral, neuro, evolutionary and other economic models. To give one example of many at least two different popular multigenerational spending models were spawned from the observation that all living creatures conform to a model of maximizing great-grandchildren (or equivalent in genetic income). The two popular models were developed by the late William Strauss and his still living partner Neil Howe and their model competes with the more rough and ready HS Dent jr. model.
The Bell shaped, normal or Gaussian, distribution of economic outcomes. Since I only speak pidgin statistics I can only suggest reading lists if anyone is interested. So far as I can tell there are no normally distributed economic outcomes of significance and a lot of fighting over what models apply to what outcomes.
The product life cycle as applied to services has taken everyone by surprise. For example the development of DARPAnet into the worldwide web was not forecast by anyone. Likewise the use of computer chips to provide information in just about everything but food and sex is still going strong.
So what biggies did I miss?
Monetary policy. Friedman got his Nobel memorial by showing the harm caused by the 1927-33 deflation, while Hayek got his by showing that the deflation Friedman denounced was caused by the inflation of 1921-6. Keynes demonstrated no knowledge of how the money supply worked (he simply proposed a refutable general theory as a guide to policy and research) and more or less accepted the earlier Fisher model as right. Despite refutations by both Hayek and Friedman the Fed, Congress and most administrations are still running with the Fisher model.
Economic man. The Adam Smith model of economic man was disproved by biologists in the 1960s and this refutation was popularized by Dawkins in "The Selfish Gene" in 1976. This spawned behavioral, neuro, evolutionary and other economic models. To give one example of many at least two different popular multigenerational spending models were spawned from the observation that all living creatures conform to a model of maximizing great-grandchildren (or equivalent in genetic income). The two popular models were developed by the late William Strauss and his still living partner Neil Howe and their model competes with the more rough and ready HS Dent jr. model.
The Bell shaped, normal or Gaussian, distribution of economic outcomes. Since I only speak pidgin statistics I can only suggest reading lists if anyone is interested. So far as I can tell there are no normally distributed economic outcomes of significance and a lot of fighting over what models apply to what outcomes.
The product life cycle as applied to services has taken everyone by surprise. For example the development of DARPAnet into the worldwide web was not forecast by anyone. Likewise the use of computer chips to provide information in just about everything but food and sex is still going strong.
So what biggies did I miss?
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