Monthly Archives: February 2017

An apple never falls far from the tree

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Specially a green apple. From today’s Cut & Paste.

Kylar Loussikian reports on the race for Mike Baird’s NSW seat of Manly, The Australian, yesterday:

Speculation is mounting among party insiders that Mr Baird may weigh in on behalf of James Griffin, the preferred candidate among the (NSW Liberal) party’s dominant Moderate wing. Mr Griffin, whose mother is a local Greens councillor …

Mr Griffin’s mother is a what?! Manly Daily, October 8, 2015:

Cr Griffin is a member of the Liberal Party and his mother, Cr Cathy Griffin, is a member of The Greens.

There are fears this Spawn of the Greens could destroy Tony Abbott. The Australian, continued:

… conservative Liberal sources claiming efforts to install a Moderate are part of a plot to oust Tony Abbott from his federal seat.

Mr Abbott has done battle with Mother Griffin before. The Daily Telegraph, September 26, 2014:

More than 200 people gathered at Prime Minister Tony Abbott’s Manly office today as part of a national day of action to fight for the Renewable ­Energy Target … Manly Councillor Cathy Griffin said the event was a ­success.

“This is the biggest protest I’ve seen outside Tony Abbott’s office,” Ms Griffin said.

Even Mr Griffin needs to watch out for his mammy. The Daily Telegraph, yesterday:

Meanwhile, Manly Greens spokeswoman Cathy Griffin, the mother of Liberal hopeful James, said they will be running a candidate.

But Mama, James loves you, Manly Daily, October 8, 2015:

Cr James Griffin said he and his mother’s political views sometimes made for interesting discussions.

Is there no depths to which the Libs will not sink?

Useful family advice for students

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From Behavioural Economics Saved My Dog by Dan Ariely

Dear Dan, As a university professor who has been teaching for a long time, what advice would you give to students who are starting their academic year? —PETER

Simple: cut all ties with your family—particularly your grandparents. Here’s why: most professors discover that family members, particularly grandmothers, tend to pass away just before exams.

Deciding to look into this question with the kind of rigour that only academics are able to (and have the time for), Mike Adams, a professor of biology at Eastern Connecticut State University, collected years of data and concluded that grandmothers are 10 times more likely to die before a mid-term assessment and 19 times more likely to die before a final exam. Grandmothers of students who aren’t doing so well in class are at even higher risk, and the worst news is for students who are failing: their grandmothers are 50 times more likely to die as the grandmothers of students who are passing the class.

The most straightforward explanation for these results? These students share their struggles with their grandmothers, and the poor old ladies prove unable to cope with the difficult news and die. Based on this sound reasoning, from a public policy perspective, students—particularly ones that are failing—clearly shouldn’t mention the timing of their exams or their academic performance to any relatives. (A less likely interpretation of these results would be that the students are lying, but this is really hard to imagine.)

Joking aside, social relationships are very important for our health and happiness, in good times and bad. And fostering these bonds is a wise goal for anyone at any stage of life.

The economic idiot savants of our time

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I don’t often find myself in almost total agreement with Robert Skidelsky but this is one of those times. This is from an article titled, Economists versus the Economy.

What unites the great economists, and many other good ones, is a broad education and outlook. This gives them access to many different ways of understanding the economy. The giants of earlier generations knew a lot of things besides economics. Keynes graduated in mathematics, but was steeped in the classics (and studied economics for less than a year before starting to teach it). Schumpeter got his PhD in law; Hayek’s were in law and political science, and he also studied philosophy, psychology, and brain anatomy.

Today’s professional economists, by contrast, have studied almost nothing but economics. They don’t even read the classics of their own discipline. Economic history comes, if at all, from data sets. Philosophy, which could teach them about the limits of the economic method, is a closed book. Mathematics, demanding and seductive, has monopolized their mental horizons. The economists are the idiots savants of our time.

Let me also give you his opening para:

Policymakers don’t know what to do. They press the usual (and unusual) levers and nothing happens. Quantitative easing was supposed to bring inflation “back to target.” It didn’t. Fiscal contraction was supposed to restore confidence. It didn’t. Earlier this month, Mark Carney, Governor of the Bank of England, delivered a speech called “The Specter of Monetarism.” Of course, monetarism was supposed to save us from the specter of Keynesianism!

With virtually no usable macroeconomic tools, the default position is “structural reform.” But no one agrees on what it entails. Meanwhile, crackpot leaders are stirring discontented voters. Economies, it seems, have escaped from the grasp of those supposed to manage them, with politics in hot pursuit.

The above article was sent to me by a friend in Canada. This next quote is from a presentation of another colleague, this one given last week to the House of Commons in the UK. I’m afraid there’s no link, but you will get the drift. He is the only other self-identified “classical economist” I know of.

HOW DID PROFESSIONAL ECONOMISTS GET IT IN TO THEIR HEADS THAT THEY COULD PREDICT THE FUTURE?

Very simply, because that is what they have been taught in universities for the past fifty years. Of course Adam Smith would have laughed at the idea. Marx didn’t believe it either, nor did Keynes. But, starting around one hundred years ago, the university economics curriculum throughout the Western world was hi-jacked by a particular way of looking at economic activity that came to be known as ‘neoclassical’ economics . So successful was this takeover that by 1970 it had driven out every other method of analysis, like a cuckoo in a nest. Academic papers that did not adopt this particular method were rejected by the leading scholarly journals, thus ensuring uniformity of thought throughout the profession.

And while I am at it, I have been sent a third paper by another colleague which I hope he won’t mind my pre-empting his own publication since he is in the US and we are very unlikely to have overlapping readers. This is what he wrote:

Why hasn’t this recovery been stronger? The predominant explanation blames inadequate stimulus spending. It holds that more “demand” is needed to boost the economy. But this inverts the nature of the relationship between demand and economic performance. Demand is the result—not the cause—of economic activity. Therefore production, not demand, determines growth. At best, trying to stimulate demand while ignoring production is like trying to grow a flower by watering its petals instead of its roots.

But it’s often worse than that. The state can spend only what the private sector produces, which means government must first remove a dollar from the economy to spend it into the economy. Because doing so misallocate resources, the net effect is worse than zero: Rather than merely neglecting the flower’s roots, it’s like sucking water out of the soil and pouring it over the flower’s petals. Small wonder the economy has failed to break even three percent growth rates.

What to do seems economically clear enough, but how do we get the politics to line up? This is the question of our times, with every party of the left only wishing to do what would make things worse while preventing, as best they can, the parties of the right from fixing things up.