"I have enough disapproving thoughts on economists’ divorce from the realities of markets and businesses due to their torrid affairs with white board models to fill its own essay or seven, so I won’t go into it much more here."
It's even better when the white board model output is reported as "research showing X" or "study proving X" or "evidence for X"
Oh yes. I imagine that if you were a research vet specializing in felines, but had a severe cat allergy and so avoided being around cats at all, no one would really take you very seriously. Yet if you are an economist who doesn't actually spend time talking with business owners and workers, or having spent time running a business, well that's fine, you can get all the data you need from you office. Just make your models to work with the data you can get. That's fine.
Even just the way so many professional economists ignore the difference between "markets tend towards equilibrium" and "markets are always at equilibrium" makes me nuts. It's as though adjustment time is always zero, to every change, ever. No such thing as a shortage... grumble grumble... get off my lawn... grumble grumble... just zooming out to a scale where transitions are invisible, then pretending that generalizes to granular cases... grumble...
But we should know better! Economists, like most academics, suffer a lot from not getting feedback when we are wrong, and being taken seriously even though we are pretty well removed from reality.
Sad thing is, it is probably still by far the best social science.
It's telling that instead of explaining what their plan is to fix the economy, the establishment response is to gaslight, quibble over definitions, and redefine words. Par for the course for the symbol manipulators.
That was my thought for the next essay: What Should We Actually Do to Fix This? Like a top 10 list of what to fix, or stop breaking.
It would be fun if 3-4 other economist bloggers would chime in on that. I might be able to goad Caplan and maybe Kling into that. I don't know if Cowan actually explicitly says anything anymore, but maybe Tabarrok would.
Work ethic is shit nowadays. If you volunteered to pay my new hires wages for a year I would turn you down. Not worth the destruction of service goods by workers who only care about a paycheck. Sure, take off every other Tuesday to go paintballing with you best friend Justin and then complain that the little guy can't get ahead while asking for an advance on next week's pay because you need gas money. Ya, don't worry about that $4000,00 door you screwed up last week that will take 12 weeks to replace which means the customer won't be paying their bill until 30 days after that. No big deal because us business owners are rich and can cover it.
We need a hard correction in the labor market and I only see that happening with a depression where shit workers go hungry.
Every business owner I've talked to recently seems to share my sentiments. They are all questioning whether or not it is worth all the extra stress running massive overhead and running herd on 10 employees to make 20% more profit than when they worked all by themselves. Wonder what will happen when the projects start drying up. I'm sure the business owners will all take pay cuts to keep ungrateful, unproductive employees on the payroll so they can afford the $1000.00 Iphone they use to Snapchat with their dipshit friends while they are on the clock.
Recession though? No way. Paul Krugman says it doesn't matter anyway and he won a Nobel prize so he can't be wrong, ever.
That work ethic issue was one of the recurring themes I heard from all manufacturing employers when I was interviewing them about two years ago. Getting people that would reliably show up to work was incredibly difficult. They all told me that what they looked for anymore wasn't skill so much as interest in having a job and being willing to learn it. That was what was missing.
I hope it doesn't come down to a depression causing people to go hungry to fix that problem, but I am not entirely sure how you fix it otherwise. I suppose schools could actually enforce consequences for not doing the work, but they aren't allowed to fail students and the parents either don't care or lose their shit on the teachers if their kids get a bad grade. And of course the government will step in to support people who won't support themselves. There seems to be a lot of failure points in the system that need fixing before things can get better.
"I have enough disapproving thoughts on economists’ divorce from the realities of markets and businesses due to their torrid affairs with white board models to fill its own essay or seven, so I won’t go into it much more here."
It's even better when the white board model output is reported as "research showing X" or "study proving X" or "evidence for X"
Oh yes. I imagine that if you were a research vet specializing in felines, but had a severe cat allergy and so avoided being around cats at all, no one would really take you very seriously. Yet if you are an economist who doesn't actually spend time talking with business owners and workers, or having spent time running a business, well that's fine, you can get all the data you need from you office. Just make your models to work with the data you can get. That's fine.
Even just the way so many professional economists ignore the difference between "markets tend towards equilibrium" and "markets are always at equilibrium" makes me nuts. It's as though adjustment time is always zero, to every change, ever. No such thing as a shortage... grumble grumble... get off my lawn... grumble grumble... just zooming out to a scale where transitions are invisible, then pretending that generalizes to granular cases... grumble...
I must admit that as a non-economist, I probably commit several of these errors all the time (and plenty more, I'm sure).
But we should know better! Economists, like most academics, suffer a lot from not getting feedback when we are wrong, and being taken seriously even though we are pretty well removed from reality.
Sad thing is, it is probably still by far the best social science.
It's telling that instead of explaining what their plan is to fix the economy, the establishment response is to gaslight, quibble over definitions, and redefine words. Par for the course for the symbol manipulators.
That was my thought for the next essay: What Should We Actually Do to Fix This? Like a top 10 list of what to fix, or stop breaking.
It would be fun if 3-4 other economist bloggers would chime in on that. I might be able to goad Caplan and maybe Kling into that. I don't know if Cowan actually explicitly says anything anymore, but maybe Tabarrok would.
Work ethic is shit nowadays. If you volunteered to pay my new hires wages for a year I would turn you down. Not worth the destruction of service goods by workers who only care about a paycheck. Sure, take off every other Tuesday to go paintballing with you best friend Justin and then complain that the little guy can't get ahead while asking for an advance on next week's pay because you need gas money. Ya, don't worry about that $4000,00 door you screwed up last week that will take 12 weeks to replace which means the customer won't be paying their bill until 30 days after that. No big deal because us business owners are rich and can cover it.
We need a hard correction in the labor market and I only see that happening with a depression where shit workers go hungry.
Every business owner I've talked to recently seems to share my sentiments. They are all questioning whether or not it is worth all the extra stress running massive overhead and running herd on 10 employees to make 20% more profit than when they worked all by themselves. Wonder what will happen when the projects start drying up. I'm sure the business owners will all take pay cuts to keep ungrateful, unproductive employees on the payroll so they can afford the $1000.00 Iphone they use to Snapchat with their dipshit friends while they are on the clock.
Recession though? No way. Paul Krugman says it doesn't matter anyway and he won a Nobel prize so he can't be wrong, ever.
That work ethic issue was one of the recurring themes I heard from all manufacturing employers when I was interviewing them about two years ago. Getting people that would reliably show up to work was incredibly difficult. They all told me that what they looked for anymore wasn't skill so much as interest in having a job and being willing to learn it. That was what was missing.
I hope it doesn't come down to a depression causing people to go hungry to fix that problem, but I am not entirely sure how you fix it otherwise. I suppose schools could actually enforce consequences for not doing the work, but they aren't allowed to fail students and the parents either don't care or lose their shit on the teachers if their kids get a bad grade. And of course the government will step in to support people who won't support themselves. There seems to be a lot of failure points in the system that need fixing before things can get better.