On Mon, 22 Feb 2010 18:35:18 -0800, "nom=de=plume"
wrote:

"bpuharic" wrote in message
.. .
On Mon, 22 Feb 2010 20:30:17 -0500, wrote:


Ayn Rand was Greenspan's guru.

OI am not a Johnny come lately on this. I was telling people in the
90s that the great economy we were hearing about was an illusion.

i gotta admit i was a bit hoodwinked by the free market fundies. i've
always been a 'social democrat' but took a few economics courses, read
friedman, and didn't appreciate that the size of the US economy could
hide a bubble the size of the one we just went through.

what i've learned is that economics is guesswork. i'm a chemist. if
we knew as little about chemistry as economists know about economics,
the atmosphere would catch fire every time someone lit a match.


Economics... the dismal science.

The allure of free market capitalism is strong. And, there are lots of
psychological factors that are included, so it's not just that economic
numbers can be complicated, but there's a strong individual psychology at
play as well. Fun classes, but I never liked micro that much. Macro is more
interesting.

my academic exposure to economics is limited to 2 courses i took in
grad school. i think the attractiveness of the free market idea is
it's simple. economists can play with it without getting their hands
dirty in the real world.

but when you look at the track record of economists in predicting the
outcomes of their theories, it's literally no better than guesswork.

i come at this from a physical science orientation, having an MS in
chemical physics. quantum mechanics and thermodynamics don't leave
alot of wiggle room in the accuracy of their predictions (eg the lamb
shift is accurate to 11 decimal places).

economics is breathtaking both in its simplicity and in its
inaccuracy.

and i agree, macro is much more interesting than micro.