22 years and the book is obsolete, passé? "Only yesterday" I purchased my Dornbusch text and it was a difficult decision because it cost me 10% of my salary then. But it couldnt be obtained from the library and the course I was doing required it. This edition is much clearer than the original, probably thanks to Fischer, or because I learned things in the meanwhile or because the perplexing J effect (IQ increases exponentially along the time axis).
The book is big in reducing population growth, which is the main cause (for the authors, not for me) of slow GNP growth. Twenty years ago no one imagined that population growth could be reduced to current levels and negative population growth should cause GNP collapse, like in Russia, Japan, etc. Today, Stanley Fischer is our central banker and keeps making exasperating declarations against the religious sector for having too many children. I think the time has come to send him to retirement, and replace him with someone of the new generation. Old and wrong ideas cannot be changed except after the old generation retires or dies.
Another observation is that the book suffers from the Good Soldier Schweik (see statue) cognitive distorsion (I just made that up). In the Schweik book, a soldier is missing and they shanghay a man at random in the street, and the military machine never notices the difference. People, according that 1920 book, are interchangeable. The Dornbusch&Fischer book uses the production equation where manpower is just a variable, and never even suggests that age composition, educational levels and let say it, the racial composition are of supreme importance. This is typical of the hippy era of the seventies but Fischer is a Rhodesian and should know that Zimbabwe's GNP is less a function of 3 or 4 million Africans than those missing 200,000 English settlers.
In general, the science of economics exists in an imaginary, stable, homogeneous country peopled by Europeans, but that world does not reflect Earth Anno 2012. Applying economic ideas that may have worked in America 1970 will cause crisis in 2012. I am expecting a new generation of theoreticians that "didnt knew Joseph" aka never knew the seventies, and will be able to develope the macroeconomic management tools for today. More explicitly, instruments suitable to the behaviour of societies composed by diverse, antithetical, competing ethnic groups. Unfortunately, the new generation is being inculcated the PC doctrine of human equality and interchangeability so my hope may never come true.
24 comments:
A high birth rate is detrimental to economic growth if a large proportion of the birth cohort remain subsidized by the state into adulthood and few of them contribute substantively to the economy. I'd say the ultra-Orthodox yeshiva bocher set fits - subsidized study of absolutely useless religious nonsense and a secularly deficienct education that limits most of them from ever contributing substantively to the economy. For B, I'll clarify that the deficient education comment applies to "most", not "all." Still pretty grim.
The economists of the '70s were wrong even for their own time. When I was at Wharton in the late '70s, they took us to see Larry Klein, a highly respected economic forecaster (no relation I hope). We were treated to a lecture on how the Soviet Union would soon surpass the US in GDP because they had a planned economy. He showed us a graph where the US economy was expanding at X% and the Soviet at Y% and since their slope was higher, the lines would cross in a few years. Just look at this graph and you'll see. My mother had lived in the Soviet Union during the war and did not speak highly of it (like almost every ex-Soviet, she detested Communism in the strongest possible terms) and I instinctively knew that he was wrong. Later on, it was revealed that the Soviet statistics were all phony, which apparently did not occur to Klein.
K
Related to J's comment about the new generation being inculcated in PC doctrine, The Forward online version has just published a defense of Steven Jay Gould. Towards the end comes an attack on comparative intelligence testing buried in the discussion of Steven Jay Gould's now disproven claims of measuremnt bias against 19th century scientist Samuel Morton in The Mismeasure of Man. Quite a backhanded dismissal of a subject neither Gould nor the article's author seem to know much about, or cared to.
"This peaceable vision was marred last year, when The New York Times reported a controversy over another Gould book. “The Mismeasure of Man,” originally published in 1981 and revised in 1996, cites one 19th-century Pennsylvania scientist who, Gould charged, measured skulls erroneously and misused data to calculate human intelligence. Gould was repelled by the comparative intelligence testing of races. The latter pseudo-science, he explains, was used to keep immigrants — not unlike his own grandparents — from entering America. In 2011, a group of scientists in Pennsylvania re-measured some of the same skulls and claimed that the original study was accurate and unbiased. The Times article, accompanied by a gloating editorial, quoted one Columbia University scientist, who called Gould a “charlatan.” ...
If Gould made a mistake, as scientists often do — even Einstein and Newton were not always correct — his precious legacy as a writer is part of the shelf of wisdom literature for our time."
http://forward.com/articles/156488/evolutionary-biology-after-auschwitz/
This is classic liberalism. Intentions count more than truth (thus the "fake but accurate" Bush letters). Gould's intentions were good, so he must be forgiven for faking his data in order falsely accuse a (bad) dead man of faking his data.
Some of the 19th century writers were spectacularly wrong in their writings about immigrants. Here is Francis Walker, President of MIT, writing in The Atlantic in 1896:
"Only a short time ago, the immigrants from southern Italy, Hungary, Austria, and Russia together made up hardly more than one per cent of our immigration. To-day the proportion has risen to something like forty per cent, and threatens soon to become fifty or sixty per cent, or even more. The entrance into our political, social, and industrial life of such vast masses of peasantry, degraded below our utmost conceptions, is a matter which no intelligent patriot can look upon without the gravest apprehension and alarm. These people have no history behind them which is of a nature to give encouragement. They have none of the inherited instincts and tendencies which made it comparatively easy to deal with the immigration of the olden time. They are beaten men from beaten races; representing the worst failures in the struggle for existence. Centuries are against them, as centuries were on the side of those who formerly came to us. They have none of the ideas and aptitudes which fit men to take up readily and easily the problem of self-care and self-government, such as belong to those who are descended from the tribes that met under the oak-trees of old Germany to make laws and choose chieftains."
The admiration for the German's capacity for self -government is a particularly spectacular FAIL. He really put his foot in it there. Walker, BTW, still has a building named for him at MIT.
K
I think Walker intended for the reader to include the Anglo-Saxons among those Germanic tribes.
Disraeli was more correct - ths ancestors of the "broken races" were writing works of philosophy when Walker's ancestors were still painting themselves blue. Somehow the broken men from E. Europe, Italy, etc. got the hang of democracy just fine.
K
The problem with guys like Walker is that they gave an anti-immigrant stance a bad name. Having been spectacularly wrong about the previous set of immigrants, they are taken as object lesson on why current anti-immigrant advocates must be equally wrong. This is why guys like Gould are pro-immigration even if it may be "bad for the Jews" - they see Haitians as stand-ins for their own immigrant ancestors. Reb Moshe from Pinsk and Jean Louis from Port au Prince are the same to them. We get our revenge on Walker by letting Jean Louis in.
K
BTw, the piece that "leaped to Gould's defense" was printed in Scientific American, which in recent years has become a solidly leftist bastion (well to the left of the NYT which had the audacity to attack Gould in a betrayal of its own leftist credentials).
K
Ok - one last thing. I clicked on the link and went to the SA "defense", which I expected to have at least some level of facts or reasoning in it, even if biased to the left. Instead it was remarkably fact free. The author states, "biological determinism was and continues to be a dangerous pseudoscientific ideology" but offers absolutely zero evidence for this conclusion. Apparently it must be taken as a matter of faith and a starting point. Morton MUST have been wrong and Gould right because the former was a determinist and Gould was on the side of the angels. No need to bother with all those boring measurements of skull capacity and IQ and such - Gould is MORALLY correct and science must follow morality above all or else the road of science leads to Auschwitz (odd that they do not mention Hiroshima - a much more technologically driven hell and one in which Jewish scientists with backgrounds much like Gould's played a significant part).
K
I bought Gould's "I have landed" book and it contains cute stories. As SCiAm writes, measuring skulls is very technical and includes many judgmental decisions like what skull to leave out because it is untypical, what about female skulls, adolescents, old persons, sick persons, and so many other variables. Pity that these speculations get out of the lab.
Yes, it's a pity that Scientific American has lurched to the Left. Probably a reaction to the pro-religion, anti-science stand of segments of the American Right. Race and religion poison everything in the U.S., and we aren't even allowed to talk about them openly.
"We get our revenge on Walker by letting Jean Louis in."
It would be better to make peace with Walker and keep Jean Louis from Port-au-Prince and Abdel-Salam from Somalia out. We have to live with the consequences of the immigration. Walker got a death pass.
The left is pro-religion, anti-science also. They worship Gaia and PC.
Re: Walker - that's the point. It WOULD be better, but the left is still fighting wars with dead men like Morton and maintain considerable support for doing so. By the time Jews wake up to the fact that they made a mistake this time and that Abdel Salam is no friend of the Jews despite his supposed moral equivalence with grandfather Moshe, it will be far too late to do anything about it.
K
>Later on, it was revealed that the Soviet statistics were all phony, which apparently did not occur to Klein.
I don't know what you were studying, K, but this statement shows you missed the main lesson: to Klein and his cohort and inheritors, there is no such thing as "phony" or "accurate" statistics. There are only "good" and "bad" statistics, as determined by their usefulness to our side in the "who-whom" game.
For some reason they didn't tell me this at the time, but "Klein had been a member of the American Communist Party in 1946 and 1944 while in Chicago; he later said that this was the result of youthful naïveté."
The picture is beginning to fall into place. The McCarthyites were more right than they knew.
K
More right than WE knew. I can recommend Blacklisted By History if you want an alternative look at McCarthy.
McCarthy's main problem was that he was principled and stupid. He was strolling along the beach and saw a tentacle on the sand, and started poking at it with his pocketknife. The tentacle turned out to belong to one of the Deep Ones, who came out and crunched him.
The writing had been on the wall quite some time before-Forrestal should have served as an example to the prudent. Even McCarthy's allies, Nixon and the Kennedies, cut deals and stood down in their time. But McCarthy, being the dumb honorable Marine he was, stood on principle-Communists had no place in the USA's government, think tanks and media. Which was a bit like insisting that wool has no place in a wool blanket, so he had to be destroyed, and he was.
McCarthy had his henchmen like Cohen who did the dirty jobs for him. With vaseline.
Compared to what was on the other side, Cohn was a tzaddik.
Tzaddikim dont die of AIDS.
Again, compare Cohn to the guys facing McCarthy. If you think the American Communist establishment was a paragon of morality, I can recommend Ron Radosh's books.
It would be hard to find a more morally, sexually, etc. depraved person than Cohn. On the other hand, he was not an agent of a foreign power and in his own crazy way he loved America and did not secretly wish for its destruction or humiliation in the way that Klein (for example) did and still does in his heart of hearts. The "youthful naivete" thing is just crap. Yes, once it became publicly undeniable that Uncle Joe was a genocidal dictator (not that it wasn't obvious from the start) they ran for the exits of the Party, but inside they felt that capitalist Amerika was and is fundamentally flawed and must be destroyed and remade or at least cut down to size so that it can do no more "damage" in the world.
K
As Shternlicht says in The Book of Daniel (E. L. Doctorow), the American Communist Party was invented by John Edgar Hoover.
As an aside, the Rosenberg boys lived on the street that I grew up on during their parents trial. This was before I was born, but older neighbors told me that the boys and their hosts were watched by the FBI.
Doctorow, a card carrying leftist if there ever was one, WOULD say that, wouldn't he?
K
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