Saturday, July 11, 2009

Just a thought.

One on my majors in school, Economics, is getting whacked about these days.  Reading the Black Swan book by NNT, I am learning about how Economists are terrible at making predictions.  I am also hearing that Nobel Prize winning economists are on both sides of the fence when it comes to the massive spending of the Obama administration.  Some economists are saying that the massive spending is foolish; some are saying there should be more.  Some economists are also saying that the seemingly high unemployment in America would be worse if it wasn't for the stimulus spending!
 
Why is a Milton Friedman, F.A. Hayek, Free Market, Libertarian economics type to say for himself?  Taleb does say good things in his book about Hayek, Libertarians, and F.A. Bastiat.  I can also recall William Buckley reporting that Milton Friedman did not make predictions.  I also say that if economists were good at predicting then Socialism and Communism would work.  They don't and economists shouldn't make predictions.  Simply put, there is too much going on and so much subjectivity in the world economy that no one could know it or control it.  As for all these Nobel Prize wining Economists disagreeing, I say that the Nobel Prize committee doesn't know what the hell it is doing.  After all, it gave a peace prize to Yasser Arafat as well as Al Gore.  Sure, they gave a Nobel prize to Milton Friedman and F.A. Hayek, but that just goes to show that sometimes even bad organizations do correct things.  It may have also been a plot by the Nobel Committee to discredit the two in a strange attempt to confuse intelligent people.

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