Matt Nolan

Discussion Tuesday

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I believe I had a Top 10 up on Rates Blog yesterday, defending economists (because why not).  I’ll post on that another day.  Here I’ll leave the floor open to criticising economists – although I’m not sure if I agree with the implied assumptions in today’s discussion Tuesday 😉

Economists largely base analysis on tautologies.   Given that they deal with synthetic variables (GDP, inflation) this is inappropriate and misleading.

3 replies
  1. jamesz
    jamesz says:

    I… what??? We can’t be both addicted to unrealistic maths and tautologous! How a tautology can be ‘inappropriate and misleading’ is also a bit beyond me. And I’m pretty sure that even macro variables are based on measurement, so they’re not ‘synthetic’. What does this even mean?

    • Luc Hansen
      Luc Hansen says:

      I agree. What, exactly, is synthetic about a rise in the price of petrol?

      Unless someone has a synthetic credit card 🙂

      But I do admit, watching (figuratively speaking) Brad de Long and John Cochrane go head to head, each with their separate equations to prove opposite sides of the same debate, makes me wonder if economics is more Plato than Einstein.

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