ECONOMIC/ECONOMETRIC APPLICATIONS
Well, calling the advantage of better finances unfair makes sense if competitive balance has some value for you as a spectator. If not, I guess you would not mind following a sport like football (aka soccer), here only half a dozen clubs in all Europe stand a chance of winning the Champions League.
The American sports leagues don't work like that though. They all function as de facto monopolies, imposing their rules on their discipline (which allowed them to artificially limit player salaries and implemented racial segregation for decades for example) and redistributing resources, allowing teams like the Pittsburgh Pirates or the Kansas City Royals (considered for a long time as a developement organisation by the New York Yankees) to go on making profit without even trying to be competitive.
I agree that there are a lot of overconfident hacks (those that neglect a few crucial variables and rules of thumb in applying them), but you'll find that in ANY discipline.
Economics does not translate in practise as easily as hard sciences like physics or chemistry. According to my experience and observations, very few decisions made by corporate or public organisations are based on the undisputable findings of economists. As Moneyball (the book) shows, there is a strong resistence to implement the theory. And if econometrics is used, it is often with flawed models, as demonstrated by the risk models that allowed the 2008 crisis to occur (see Michael Lewis's other great book The Big Short). I would say practitioners resist with good reason in most cases, because in terms of explanatory or predictive value, economics is still in its infancy, because it still fails to take most of reality's complexity and randomness into account.
Sorry for the digression from the Movie talk, feel free to open a new thread if you want to discuss it further.
I don't care about sports. My understanding is that if a team I root for beats the spread, that's pretty much a victory. I'll watch when there're grudge matches, because that usually indicates a good game. An team organization will be able to put in what its fans put in. That is all. Economic fairness doesn't mean its going to be fair on the field in the strict win/lose probability scenario. But this whole subject is annoyingly tedious. I'll cheer for the El Paso Diablos whenever they have a fireworks display scheduled after the game.
Moving on to the actual topic at hand, I don't know where you could possibly be getting this from. Econometrics is applied WHENEVER it's most likely to be helpful, which is actually ALWAYS when it comes to businesses that can afford the use of it. This is why we're bombarded with surveys all day and desk jobs usually consist of crunching numbers in Excel. Businesses wouldn't be able to come up with expected utility functions without econometric techniques FINDING the utility functions in the first place using probability models that, regardless of what you've heard, actually work quite well and much more than often.
Economics is hardly in its infancy. The mathematics needed to predict these outcomes are pretty solid. There's always room to grow, but as far as those that understand its methods are concerned, it's NEVER considered a good idea to brush it aside as a theory in its "infancy". No, what is ACTUALLY in need of progress to maximize the applications of these methods on a large enough scale like Wall Street is better methods of gathering data. We simply don't have the ability to account for every variable, and there's a good chance we never will, and that's BECAUSE of the fact that there are new variables constantly popping in and out of existence in the economy, and any one of them can drastically change the game. This is why I'm against the reckless use of such models in general that try to predict outcomes in systems they have absolutely no control over (like, say, in Washington). There's simply no way of gathering enough data to account for all of it. But in smaller scales, Econometrics is ALWAYS being applied with great results.
Amazon is my favorite example of the triumph of Econometrics in business (mainly due to the fact that their example was used in my Business Statistics textbook).
Si vis pacem, para bellum
This is more pertaining to the use of econometrics in individual businesses, and the fact that it works. Macroeconomics is rather out of the scope of the discussion, but sure, why not. My standing is that mathematical applications can theoretically be applied to large economies, but it's far too impractical. We simply don't have the capability of gathering the data needed, and we never truly will be able to if we like our privacy (and I love my privacy). Just as video gamers are being utilized in large numbers to come up with molecular structures that could fight diseases, as opposed to a small team of scientists, the market works the same way. By the way, I totally ripped that last bit from Cracked.
Si vis pacem, para bellum
Oh, Austrian, btw.
Si vis pacem, para bellum
I'm proud to say I just sorta lost an argument to an Economic historian regarding Austrian and Keynesian economics, and I've shaped my understanding of it (I haven't really changed my position at all, though). In my love of Austrian economics, I've projected myself far too much onto the general populace. It only works if people are more likely to optimize their choices. However, there are instances in history where such a thing does not occur, and the government HAD to step in to make sure one person didn't have the power to completely maim production and growth in the country. Of course, this was ONLY due to the fact that people made stupid decisions. My position has always been that the government should provide for a decent education to incline the public to make these optimized choices. Now, I picture that as THE MOST ESSENTIAL PART when constructing an Austrian model. People have to know the rules before they can flourish in the game.
EDIT - After looking up some of the "history" this guy brought up, I found that he lied to me. Now, it's one thing to want to "win" an argument. You can at least mull it over in your head and gradually concede to some of the points you were too hot to admit to during the debate, and actually learn something (that's what I usually end up doing). But it's another to blatantly lie to try to "win". It wasn't about anything I conceded to, because my bullshit detector went off during most of the claims he was making, so it's not that I haven't learned anything. But I do feel like my resolve is stronger and my confidence is restored, because I've confirmed my predictions of what really happened during the events he misleadingly described.
Si vis pacem, para bellum
Who am I even talking to? This is a dead thread.
Si vis pacem, para bellum
Looked up more of his historical nonsense. This guy lied about damn near EVERYTHING.
Si vis pacem, para bellum
Lying bastard!
When you started to say about how people makes stupid decisions, I was gonna say that shifts everything from a discussion on economics to a discussion on your inherent right to make stupid decisions.
Mises I remember had a great quote on government schools. ...And in looking or it, I found the section its from.
In most countries today school attendance, or at least private instruction, is compulsory. Parents are obliged to send their children to school for a certain number of years or, in lieu of this public instruction at school, to have them given equivalent instruction at home. It is pointless to go into the reasons that were advanced for and against compulsory education when the matter was still a live issue. They do not have the slightest relevance to the problem as it exists today. There is only one argument that has any bearing at all on this question, viz., that continued adherence to a policy of compulsory education is utterly incompatible with efforts to establish lasting peace.
The inhabitants of London, Paris, and Berlin will no doubt find such a statement completely incredible. What in the world does compulsory education have to do with war and peace? One must not, however, judge this question, as one does so many others, exclusively from the point of view of the peoples of Western Europe. In London, Paris, and Berlin, the problem of compulsory education is, to be sure, easily solved. In these cities no doubt can arise as to which language is to be used in giving instruction. The population that lives in these cities and sends its children to school may be considered, by and large, of homogeneous nationality. But even the non-English-speaking people who live in London find it in the obvious interest of their children that instruction is given in English and in no other language, and things are not different in Paris and Berlin.
However, the problem of compulsory education has an entirely different significance in those extensive areas in which peoples speaking different languages live together side by side and intermingled in polyglot confusion. Here the question of which language is to be made the basis of instruction assumes crucial importance. A decision one way or the other can, over the years, determine the nationality of a whole area. The school can alienate children from the nationality to which their parents belong and can be used as a means of oppressing whole nationalities. Whoever controls the schools has the power to injure other nationalities and to benefit his own.
It is no solution of this problem to suggest that each child be sent to the school in which the language of his parents is spoken. First of all, even apart from the problem posed by children of mixed linguistic background, it is not always easy to decide what the language of the parents is. In polyglot areas many persons are required by their profession to make use of all the languages spoken in the country. Besides, it is often not possible for an individual?again out of regard for his means of livelihood?to declare himself openly for one or another nationality. Under a system of interventionism, it could cost him the patronage of customers belonging to other nationalities or a job with an entrepreneur of a different nationality. Then again, there are many parents who would even prefer to send their children to the schools of another nationality than their own because they value the advantages of bilingualism or assimilation to the other nationality more highly than loyalty to their own people. If one leaves to the parents the choice of the school to which they wish to send their children, then one exposes them to every conceivable form of political coercion. In all areas of mixed nationality, the school is a political prize of the highest importance. It cannot be deprived of its political character as long as it remains a public and compulsory institution. There is, in fact, only one solution: the state, the government, the laws must not in any way concern themselves with schooling or education. Public funds must not be used for such purposes. The rearing and instruction of youth must be left entirely to parents and to private associations and institutions.
It is better that a number of boys grow up without formal education than that they enjoy the benefit of schooling only to run the risk, once they have grown up, of being killed or maimed. A healthy illiterate is always better than a literate cripple.
But even if we eliminate the spiritual coercion exercised by compulsory education, we should still be far from having done everything that is necessary in order to remove all the sources of friction between the nationalities living in polyglot territories. The school is one means of oppressing nationalities?perhaps the most dangerous, in our opinion?but it certainly is not the only means. Every interference on the part of the government in economic life can become a means of persecuting the members of nationalities speaking a language different from that of the ruling group. For this reason, in the interest of preserving peace, the activity of the government must be limited to the sphere in which it is, in the strictest sense of the word, indispensable.
Until that last sentence, you'd never know that was written by a minarchist. (I call them mini-statists).
It seems odd that he's talking about avoiding war, and gets into how compulsory education lays the framework for war, but it makes total sense. Who the hell would want to fight a war if you haven't been through government schools? I wonder how many homeschooled folk become soldiers or terrorists, I would venture a guess that it is very few.
"They sold you hippies grunge, hip hop, now liberty activism."
But back to economics, and stupid decisions. If I was a socialist dictator, I wouldn't allocate any of the people's funds (my funds as dictator) to employ paparazzi, and people like TMZ and such, and there'd be no more celebrity magazines. Now that money (and wasted time living vicariously through others) can be allocated to something that matters.
But in real life, it is immoral for me to use force to prevent people from consuming celebrity magazines (and thus employing paparazzi and celebrity 'journalists') because if people wanna buy crap like that it is their business, and their money to waste.
"They sold you hippies grunge, hip hop, now liberty activism."
Regarding your first post, in my constrained vision (as described by Thomas Sowell), a nation divided within itself by a sense of apathy towards their nationality is in far more risk of war. Biological beings are selfish, and human beings are gregarious. With a lack of desire to protect that which is ours in a united manner, the opposition that does take advantage of the susceptibility of the masses will not hesitate to take advantage of our lack of will to protect our (and each other's) way of life. I agree that one shouldn't be forced into a nationalistic way of thinking, but merely influenced with the logic behind it during a time that they can decide for themselves and see that in unity, we succeed. There are psychological issues with that ideal, though, as it becomes increasingly difficult to become impassioned into unity with strangers the later that you learn to in life. However, I've stated my beliefs regarding the narrowing of education in elementary schools to math and language (when I say language, I do mean languages). When it comes to multiple languages, the individual states were put in charge of education for a reason, and that reason is to minimize the inefficiencies of a strictly uniform education. I agree it could be better, but I'm still working on that. My views on its reform are pretty underdeveloped at this point.
Regarding your second post, yes, I would never want to take that right away, but not simply because it's immoral to force the value of one form of entertainment over another. The more diverse desires we have (be it food or watching celebrity antics) the more diverse the market. The more diverse the market, the more opportunities one has to make a living, meaning decreased unemployment in a free market society. But that should go without saying.
Si vis pacem, para bellum
Wanna talk Austrian vs. Keynesian economics?
"They sold you hippies grunge, hip hop, now liberty activism."
http://freeconcord.org