Vladimir_M comments on Open Thread June 2010, Part 3 - Less Wrong

6 Post author: Kevin 14 June 2010 06:14AM

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Comment author: Vladimir_M 17 June 2010 06:29:19AM 1 point [-]

realitygrill:

It's pretty easy to get this sort of view just reading books. In my (limited) experience, there are a fair percentage of divergent types that are not like this - and they tend to be the better economists.

Could you please list some examples? Aside from Austrians and a few other fringe contrarians, I almost always see economists talking about the "real" figures derived using various price indexes as if they were physicists talking about some objectively measurable property of the universe that has an existence independent of them and their theories.

You may like Morgenstern's book On the Accuracy of Economic Measurements. How I rue the day I saw this in a used bookstore in NY and didn't have the cash to buy it..

Thanks for the pointer! Just a minor correction: apparently, the title of the book is On the Accuracy of Economic Observations. It's out of print, but a PDF scan is available (warning -- 31MB file) in an online collection hosted by the Stanford University.

I just skimmed a few pages, and the book definitely looks promising. Thanks again for the recommendation!

Comment author: realitygrill 19 June 2010 02:41:48AM *  0 points [-]

Could you please list some examples? Aside from Austrians and a few other fringe contrarians, I almost always see economists talking about the "real" figures derived using various price indexes as if they were physicists talking about some objectively measurable property of the universe that has an existence independent of them and their theories.

I meant personally - I did my undergrad in economics. I'm extremely skeptical of macroeconomics and currently throw in with the complex adaptive system dynamicists and the behavioral economists (and Hansonian cynicism; that's just me). But, to give an example, Krugman has done quite a bit of work in the complexity arena.

I just skimmed a few pages, and the book definitely looks promising. Thanks again for the recommendation!

Yeah, you're welcome! The first I heard of that book was someone using the example of calculating in-flows and out-flows of gold. Each country's estimates differed by orders of magnitude or something like that, and even signs.

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