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PaperclipPerfector  6mo ago (text post)   24898 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of October 30, 2023

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I still tend to have a lot of trust for economists, but that is maybe because I have found economists I actually trust, and I don't read the economists that would ruin my trust.

They were the first class of experts to lose my trust, after 2008. Hmm, actually, maybe the second after Iraq and the GWOT. Of course I never believed the "gender" and "psychology" experts in the first place, so there is that too.

I studied economics between 2009-2013. It was a contentious time for economics. I don't trust an expert just because they have a PhD in economics, but I think some basics of the field have held up really well. And I think the field in general has robust data gathering and adversarial checking of data.

Out of curiosity, how much stock do you put in the polls of economists that IGM Chicago puts out? Presumably such polls dilute out individual cranks and their idiosyncrasies all come out in the wash, but it would still be of limited use if there's systematic biases and blind spots.

Low to no usefulness.

To be a useful survey question of economists, a question needs to:

  1. Be very limited in scope
  2. Have a clear preference in how the economists answer (i.e. Strongly agree or Strongly disagree clearly wins)
  3. Not be a rephrased basic econ question (I will caveat that this is maybe useful sometimes)

Given those limitations not all the survey questions are useful.

Many of them have a huge scope like asking "would regulation of x industry be [good]". That becomes basically a vibes questions about how you feel about regulation in general. Even the staunchest libertarian leaning economist can acknowledge regulation is sometimes helpful. And even the staunchest statist pro-regulator out there can acknowledge that some regulations are harmful. So the question really becomes 'what quality of regulation do you think is likely'.

If the economists don't clearly come down on one side of the question, then you are back to a foundational problem of "how do you know which experts to trust if the experts disagree with each other?" This seems useful for someone that wants to organize a panel discussion between economists that disagree with each other, but less useful if you are just a pleb trying to figure out what the experts say on a topic.

Sometimes there are questions about price movements, or supply and demand movements. You can predict what economists will say by understanding a basic econ 101 textbook. You'll typically see fewer "uncertain" answers for these questions. It is maybe useful to have a professional economist interpret a current political problem and translate the econ 101 rules for everyone. But I do believe that people can do this for themselves. And typically when they fail to make this translation it is because they willfully don't want it to be true, and no amount of expert consensus will get through to them.

https://www.kentclarkcenter.org/surveys/women-and-the-labor-market/

Question A: By enabling women’s life choices about education, work and family, the contraceptive pill made a substantial contribution to closing gender gaps in the labor market for professionals. Weighted response: 48% strongly agree, 52% agree.

Question B: Gender gaps in today’s labor market arise less from differences in educational and occupational choices than from the differential career impact of parenthood and social norms around men's and women’s roles in childrearing. Weighted response: 19% strongly agree, 74% agree, 8% uncertain.

Question C: The gender gap in pay would be substantially reduced if firms had fewer incentives to offer disproportionate rewards to individuals who work long and/or inflexible hours. Weighted response: 17% strongly agree, 70% agree, 13% uncertain.

I'll go through this survey on their website to demonstrate.

Question A: (rephrased basic econ question) If you take someone out of the labor force for a few years will they be paid more or less than someone that continued to work during that time? Obviously they will be paid less. Ok, what would be the effect of them not leaving the labor force at all. They would be paid the same.

Question B: (not limited in scope, agreement slightly unclear) It is comparing two treatment effects and asking which one is bigger. This can be very misleading: Treatment A might be huge, while treatment B might only be large. Or Treatment A is small, while treatment B is non-existent. In both cases the economist would answer the same. In this specific question you can go to the comments and find that while they think Treatment A is bigger, many seem to think Treatment B matters too.

Question C: (Agreements slightly unclear, This may be a useful one) I do think the economists didn't read the question very closely, or else there is an interpretation of "substantially" that I don't understand. This type of regulation would only address one of the things that cause a difference in pay for mothers vs not-mothers. And quite a few economists said in the previous example, that educational and occupational choices still matter. What this question is implying through the answer and the other survey responses: There is a gender pay gap. This gender pay gap has at least two major causes (educational and occupational choices vs parenthood and social norms around men's and women’s roles in childrearing). A partial solution for only one of the more major causes will substantially cause the gender pay gap to close. Removing the word "substantially" from the question would remove my objection, but it would also render the question much closer to a basic econ question.

Micro or macro? If macro, can you explain what it means that M1 and M2 money supply has been FALLING? Most of the pundits seem to be saying "nothing to see here", whereas the stopped clocks are saying it's a harbinger of recession.

That just means V is up. During COVID the Fed flooded the market with liquidity but my guess is a lot of that was semi trapped in interest on excess reserves.

By the same token during COVID you would have expected far more inflation based off of base money growth.

I preferred Micro. If I had any specialty it would have been public choice.

Macro is dark wizardy

If you like public choice, then you like would’ve enjoyed law and economics.

They had some overlap for sure. The law and econ stuff sometimes got too close to straight philosophy for my taste. Public choice was ultimately grounded in making predictions about politicians and political outcomes.

Perhaps but L&E ended up rather accurately “backing into” common law rules that evolved over time. It definetly made me think “this framework is prettt strong”

It's hard to tell if they backed into those rules, or they created a path to get to those rules. It's kind of like evolutionary psychology, where you can tell a just so story to fit what you observe. There isn't much new psychology evolving so it's hard to know how much predictive ability it has. Likewise there isn't much common law arising these days.

Public choice has at least one area where it can be repeatedly tested: elections.

Good god, it's been a while since I've cracked open my econ degree.

TLDR, M1 and M2 are basically how much free-flow, readily available cash is in the hands of the public(as opposed to Banks, the federal deposit, and other entities.)

Or, put another way, how much money do civilians and John Q Public have available at quick notice.

If it's been falling, well... that means they have less cash on-hand. Why that is could be due to... well, a long list of reasons.

Also, that redefinition of m1 annoys me to a horrendous degree for some odd reason.

The M1 redefinition makes estimating models annoying too, although M3 is a good enough measure nowadays given how liquid even savings accounts and GICs are.

I'll add nutrition "experts" to the pile as one of the groups that I started losing trust in. I still can't believe I fell for the idea that sodium is "bad for you" above the recommended 2300mg/day recommendation. Preventing muscle cramps by cranking up my sodium intake and following up on the empirical evidence for low-sodium diets was one of my first indications that the public health professionals are either ignorant or lying.

Nutrition is protoscience, barely better than psychology.

at least psychology has IQ going for it, which is useful.

Really? So what can I know about the food I eat?

Specific about given food - fine. How to avoid scurvy and similar - fine.

That we should avoid extremely processed food, overeating, sugary drinks and similar traps - many clear cases that should be avoided are known.

But science based guide for optimal diet? Hahaha. No.

Eat more calories to gain weight and less to lose weight is pretty solid.

That's physics, not nutrition, to be fair.

Quite a lot actually. We know that lack of Vitamin C will cause scurvy, lack of Vitamin D will cause rickets, and lack of Iodine will cause goiter. The last two were extremely common prior to the 20th century.

Unfortunately, nutrition science didn't build on these successes but started to make conclusions which weren't supported by evidence.

The other problem is that the job got a lot harder. We have basically invented entire new classes of food since then, and more importantly there's been a lot of population mixing. Given that the optimal diet for one group (not even race, much narrower genetic groups than that) can be completely opposite that of another, it's a damn hard nut to crack now.

I can't say I disagree, as an aspiring psychiatrist who currently has to occasionally write diet charts.

Well, at least the drugs work, regardless of the theoretical grounding of more hand-wavey stuff like therapy.

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