Someone sent me this Wiley Miller Non Sequitur comic from November 2008. The full comic is after the jump, but I think it works better — for our purposes — just as a single panel.
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Here is the full comic
Please use the comments to demonstrate your own ignorance, unfamiliarity with empirical data, ability to repeat discredited memes, and lack of respect for scientific knowledge. Also, be sure to create straw men and argue against things I have neither said nor even implied. Any irrelevancies you can mention will also be appreciated. Lastly, kindly forgo all civility in your discourse . . . you are, after all, anonymous.
"Overall household indebtedness is up from $7 trillion to almost $10 trillion since 2000. On this sum, we estimate, the American consumer has an annual interest bill of more than $500 billion; a sum, by the way, that vastly exceeds his current income growth." —Kurt Richebacher
Knowing that the vote over the weekend in Greece was really a referendum on Euro membership, a majority of the Greek Parliament said yes to staying. European Finance Ministers meet again on Wednesday to solidify the 2nd bailout package for Greece at the same time hopefully a deal is consummated between Greece and its creditors this week. The Greek 14.5b euro bond that matures on March 20th is up by 2 pts. The optimism that all will be completed and contained AGAIN to Greece has yields lower in Portugal, Spain and Italy. The iTraxx Financial Index is also narrower by...
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July 10th, 2010 at 7:15 pm
The wisdom of pygmie clydesdales…
July 10th, 2010 at 7:21 pm
Meant to add:
All economists seem to ignore reality. They ignore lots of things – market price movements aren’t represented by a gaussian distribution, that people are not always rational, that markets aren’t efficient, that governments don’t create wealth, etc.
The whole of the field of economics increasingly appears to be, if not downright fraudulent, so completely divorced from reality that one wonders whether there is any actual utility in the pursuit of economics any more. If they cannot predict, within small envelopes of error, some useful results, then what purpose does economic serve at all? So far, we have two major schools of economics (monetarism and keynesian) that have proven themselves useless for the purposes of government policy. Why do politicians still consult these people, then?
If nothing else, economists have to be the best self-promoters in the history of mankind. They keep their jobs even when they’re completely wrong on a pretty consistent basis. TBP (as well as many other blogs) have pointed out, for example, how vastly wrong Greenspan was.
OK, but has anyone thought to ask for our money back? ie, if we’re talking about clawing back the comp packages of major bank CEO’s and execs, then why should we not talk about clawing back the comp packages of economists who are now proven wrong – and who were in positions of influencing or setting policies that helped create this mess?
July 10th, 2010 at 8:21 pm
dsawy,
make it easier on yourself..
note: http://scholar.google.com/scholar?hl=en&q=History+of+Political+Economy&as_sdt=800000000000&as_ylo=&as_vis=0
and, understand that what passes as ‘Economics’, today, was cleaved from the, prior, study of “Political Economy”.
then, for more fun, see: http://clusty.com/search?input-form=clusty-simple&v%3Asources=webplus&query=Federal+Reserve+bought+the+field+of+Economics
so, we shouldn’t be, too, surprised to observe that most of today’s ‘Economists’ wouldn’t know “beans, when the bag is untied”..
July 10th, 2010 at 9:17 pm
It is starting to occur to me that beating up on Greenspan, might not be quite the ticket.
Sure he kept interest rates really low.
But he’s not the one that fueled the housing bubble. It was a national affliction that the banksters encouraged. Blame them for their greed and stupidity. And the home buyers in over their heads. And the corporatocracy for eliminating the middle class jobs.
Countrywide set the standard. Who’s gone to jail?
It’s kind of like Halloween and kids. Nobody keeps them home, and nobody makes them eat all that candy in one day.
July 11th, 2010 at 12:15 am
@Barry REitholtz — a bit OT, but given your “data-driven” modus operandi, you’ll want to check out the latest Planet Money on “LeBronomics”
http://www.npr.org/blogs/money/2010/07/09/128413796/the-friday-podcast-lebronomics
July 11th, 2010 at 12:17 am
apologies on the name-mangling. When previewing, I always read what I wanted to write, not what I rote.
July 11th, 2010 at 2:43 am
@dsawy,
You have just set a new standard regarding ‘meant to add’ ;)
July 11th, 2010 at 5:04 am
@How: Yea, that’s what happens when you have too many browser tabs open and you forget which is which.
@alfred: The Fed also had regulatory power over the banks that they never used – the Fed has much more power than interest rates they could have used to slow down or thwart the idiotic lending. The Fed used non of their regulatory powers to pull the banking sector back from the edge of stupidity, made no effort to decrease leverage in the banking system, made no warnings about the instability building within the system, the web of derivatives, etc.
Congress rewarded the Fed’s incompetence how? By giving it more power.
As Mark NB’s above, the Fed has so corrupted the field of economics, I’ll double down on my call to simply eliminate the field as socially useless.
July 12th, 2010 at 11:52 pm
“market price movements aren’t represented by a gaussian distribution”
Not ignored at all.
“that people are not always rational”
Not ignored.
“that markets aren’t efficient”
Not ignored.
“that governments don’t create wealth”
Not ignored either. In fact, on this particualr issue, WTF are you blathering about?
None of these things are ignored in modern economics. So who is it that is divorced from reality?
“If they cannot predict, within small envelopes of error, some useful results, then what purpose does economic serve at all?”
Because the role of economists is not simply to make predictions. In reality, that is the role that has been forced on to the economics profession, as it is the only role that people like you can imagine for economists because that is the role you see economics fulfilling in newspapers and on TV.
It is YOU and people like YOU that insist economists make predictions, and when they do it you are just as likely to complain that their predictions are couched in vague terms and they dont provide you with enough certainty. You demand certainty. If you dont get certainty, you wont be entertained and the economist does not return to the airwaves.
Then, when you actually get what you demand, concrete uncomplex predictions stated in no uncertain terms by economists willing to sacrifice their integrity by abandoning any hint that there is uncertainty in the world, you have the temerity to complain that every economist has it wrong!
Listen up. You dont know what economics is. You think you do, but you are wrong. Your call for the field of study to be abandoned is retarded and you deserve nothing but derision for stating it.
You probably took an economics paper or two at college, and thats where you “learned” that the entire field hinges upon EMH. Thats where you learned that the simplifying assumption of portfolio theory are sacrosanct and that no economists anywhere ever question them. And it has never occured to you that you are an economics infant, and that these were just fairy tales you were told to help you understand some simple rules in the big scary world.
You dont have to have a PHD in economics to discuss it, but you do at least have to understand it.