I will respond to just one small segment now. Got to crash soon.
Quote:
Originally Posted by
melgross 
Economics is far more than that. If that was all it is then people wouldn't be getting Phd's in it. economics 101 would be the beginning and the end.
Of course it is. We are on an Apple forum, not an economics PhD forum. If we were in the latter, I would have been happy engage you more substantively. As an aside, however, unless you get your 101s right, your 701s dont stand a chance.
Quote:
Originally Posted by
melgross
I look at economic models all the time. they are very interesting. but the value to a model is its predictive validity. and that's where things fall apart.
What models do you look at? In which branch of economics?
The reason I ask is, you seemed to be somewhat at a loss with
cameronj on the 200+year old idea of comparative advantage, which is so central to so much in economics (which is, sort of, how this whole conversation started).
Quote:
Originally Posted by
melgross
The government and businesses employ tens of thousands of economists. They are plugging data into their models constantly. They look for trends, hoping to predict what will happen next week, next month, in six months, a year, two years. But they rarely get it right for more than a low batting average.
So what? That is not the economics I am talking about. I am talking about Ricardo. Smith. Mills. Marshall. Fisher. Cassel. Berle. Means. Graham. Galbraith. Hayek. Friedman. Sachs. Stiglitz. Tobin. Miller. Modigliani. Fama. Krugman. Shiller..... I could go on and on.
You have a stunningly limited view (and understaning) of the field if you think that the thousands of desk-bound clerks churning out forecasts and spreadheets in governments and businesses is what economics is all about.
Quote:
Originally Posted by
melgross
Remember Long Term Capital? They had several Nobel Prize economists as owners of the fund. They came up with these complex models. They crashed very badly, and almost took the entire market with them. What happened? They forgot that their models only took average moves into account. they never looked at what would happen with a big swing
Of course I do. I even know (although, not well) one of the protagonists. You know nothing about LTCM if you think they "...almost took the entire market with them." It caused barely a ripple in the markets. Please check facts before making statements like that.
It was fundamentally a failure brought about by the disappearance of liquidity, precipitated at that time by the Asia Crisis. (In fact, Myron Scholes, one of the Nobel prize-winning LTCM principals and of the "Black-Scholes" model fame, ironically has a paper on the topic of disappearing liquidity in a crisis). The models they used are actually quite good, but only to a first approximation, since they rely on a mean-variance view of the world. It works 99% of the time.
The other 1% is the "big swing" you refer to. More precisely, it is the 'fat tails' resulting from the fact that many emprical distributions are "Stable Paretian" rather than "Normal" (happy to explain these, but will wait). These are very well-undersood, but cannot, inherently be modeled. (I won't bore you with the details why, but suffice it to say that in theory, variance does not exist in most Stable Paretian distributions).
The fact that we can't model the 1% doesn't in any way negate the importance of a model that can understand/explain the world the other 99% of the time. It is as silly and outlandish as saying earthquake models are completely useless because they can't predict the precise moment and intensity of the Big One.
Quote:
Originally Posted by
melgross
What about all these economists working for the other hedge funds that crashed? The brokerage funds? None of them saw what turned out to be obvious, and look at where we are!
You obviously did not look at what I wrote before carefully. You have just proved again, what I noted before: Your notion of "economist" is very different from mine. Let me state it again: I could give a hoot about hedge fund (or any Wall Street) economists. And, I feel sorry for anyone that does.
