Hardly, I wouldn't have mentioned it at all had I based an assumption that all here were stoned slakers.
Wrong. You trumpet your superiority at every turn, not least when you talk about educating people here. The last thing you expected was that some visitors to this site would be so obstreperous as to disagree with you, so you thought you could pull rank. But as I said, you don't have the first clue about the academic or professional backgrounds of the many people who post here. You don't realize how silly you sound.
Before Milton Friendman, the study of economics was philosophical in nature. Friedman changed all that. He used scientific method and historical data to base his work on. Moving forward it's been that way ever since. Has the US, Japan or the UK had double digit inflation since Friedman explained inflation was a function of the money supply? These 3 nations exclusively follow his monetary policy, didn't you ever wonder why the UK wasn't on the Euro? Of course Friedman had respect for Keynes, Keynes wasn't wrong because he was stupid. He just didn't have access to nor was economic data acurately recorded, hell back then they didn't even know what was important to record.
Not relevant.
However, people to this day still hang on to Keynes, Marx and others because their disproven theorems somehow fit with their ethical view of the world.
Concerns that a free market economy hurts a great many people because of corruption and human weakness that must be cleaned up is not the same thing as embracing Marx. This is the same ludicrous argument that to be against the war is to be pro-terrorist.
Even though in practice it hurts those they are most trying to help. It also doesn't help when politicians push economic agenda that hurts those they claim they are trying to help. They know there is a major disconnect and lack of education within their constituency so they will get more votes and stay in power. (min wage today and humanitarian aid in the 80s are perfect examples of this). As for why economists don't speak out to the public, well they do publish quite extensively if the public chooses not to read then what can I do? The media is in the entertainment business which is very sad.
But Yes I will be the first to admit economists are a bunch of elitests, we tend not to waste our time with the uneducated, we use our own taxonomy to the exclusion of others. However, I thought if the basic proven concepts were explained and presented you guys would get it. Many of you do, many of you can't emotionally handle it.
Weak. You didn't address my point. Again: George W. Bush backed the war. He has an MBA from Harvard. Most of the people in his Administration (who really call the shots, of course) favor the same policies you do. The last four or five years have been your time. Economists could have prevented a global depression, saving the lives of millions, validating their science forever, and had an administration in place that would have championed them to the moon. Why didn't it happen?
If you're telling me that this administration did not embrace the view of economists-- scientists who (according to you) would have supported the war on economic grounds-- then you're conceding my point. People in the equation matter. Politicians matter. Citizens matter. The media matter. You're admitting that despite the firm grasp of reality you and your kind enjoy, as soon as it leaves your Halls of Wisdom it becomes something else entirely-- corrupted, or seen but not used, or flat-out ignored.
This is what I mean about your argument. You want us to learn about "the law of velocity of money" (a phrase which just tickles me) but at the same time you're admitting that law really has no place in reality because the vast majority of governments are too corrupt to base their policies on it and the people are too stupid to get it.
I don't think you have a clue what you're talking about here.
Within our own (economists) community as soon a 9/11 hit we knew War was the next step, we knew who with, and who would line up where.
Flew over your head again, did it?
I was talking about your allegedly omnicient grasp of the world on September 10, not September 12. You know so much about the world as the towers fell. You knew what was happening in the world with almost absolute certainty (except for those pesky Russians). Yet you felt
just as certain you understood the world two days earlier. Nineteen men with box-cutters ruined your model.
to lump those tools in with the philosophical economic texts of the past and try to say the pratical application of economics is iffy at best, is a great disservice to yourself.
Yeah, it would be a disservice. Which is why I didn't do it and won't do it anytime in the future. I said economics as a science was mitigated, which you just said yourself with your 90%/10% ratio-- a laughable ratio, by the way.
I only need to impress those that pay me.
Lucky for you, because you'd be starving in the street otherwise.
If you want to hold on to a blind faith I can't stop you, but if you open your eyes and take a peek of how the mechanics of the economy really work, it would be of great benefit to those you most care about. No one is saying you have to like it, just understand it...
Blind faith? Where did I talk about blind faith? Was that the paragraph where I lauded the virtues of socialism?
