Saturday, October 1, 2016

Most Economists Don’t Know What They’re Talking About

I have a friend who was working on a PhD in Economics but quit. He said it was “a bunch of bullshit.” At the MS and doctorate level all that it was about was an attempt to apply advanced mathematics to something that mathematics doesn’t apply, in an attempt to make it a repeatable science (economics certainly is falsifiable in real life, which economists ignore and instead make excuses).

Economics is not a “hard” science. It’s a soft one (actually it’s not a “science” at all), so those who try to predict the future are always wrong and are only right in the way a stopped clock is right. It’s not physics where you if you shoot a rocket at the moon you know where it’s going to hit. Economists don’t know where their theories are going to hit no matter how much they assure us they do.

I took four economics classes in college. I took proficiency tests for Introduction to Micro and Macro and made an A and a B. The dean came out and shook my hand and said what I had done was almost impossible. Then I took Intermediate Macro and Micro as classes, thought, “This is a bunch of crap” and never took another class.

One doesn’t need any classes at all to understand basic economics. All you have to do is study the basic concepts, think about them, and then understand them. Beyond that, you don’t need much.

When I was about 21 years old I was on an Amtrak listening to the guy behind me. He was clearly working on a PhD in Economics because he was babbling nonsense. “Cost-push” and “demand-pull” inflation” and other nonsensical concepts (inflation is an increase in money and credit, nothing else). And he was so confident in his delusions. I remember just shaking my head.

I don’t listen to any economists. I haven’t for decades. Again, they babble nonsense. It used to be economists analyzed the economy to find out how it worked. That’s what Adam Smith did. Now they invent nonsensical concepts and then try to apply them.

About a year or so ago I read an article by a Jewish economist, all of whom are incompetent (I once had a retired college professor refer to economics as “Jewish engineering,” which is an oxymoron if there ever was one – the first nothing but a soft science and the second a hard science).

This fool was babbling that if we had completely open borders “world GNP would double.” See what I mean by incompetent? It wouldn’t double; it stagnate or go down, because when you have different tribes trying to share the same land you what you end up with is fighting and murder. Look at all the crime non-Western immigrants have brought to the U.S. (every day when I turn on the news I always wonder, “How many Americans have Muslims murdered today?”).

An economist may have a genius-level IQ but no common sense (I refer to such people as “high-IQ idiots”). Paul Krugman is a perfect example of one.

Krugman decided to become an economist after reading Isaac Asimov’s Foundation Trilogy which I read when I was 12 and even then knew some of the concepts in it were nonsense, such as the “psychohistorian” Hari Seldon predicting the future of the Galaxy ten thousand years courtesy of a hand-held calculator.

Clearly Krugman thinks he’s a modern-day Hari Seldon. What he is, instead, is deluded and incompetent. His opinion on anything should be dismissed (he still thinks the government can spend the country into prosperity by increasing the deficit).

Most economists are globalists, which means they don’t have a clue that sending our knowledge and wealth to China would lead to them stabbing us in the back, just the way they didn’t have a clue about us sending our wealth and knowledge to the Middle East for their oil would lead to the same back-stabbing (we sent money and material to the Soviet Union during WWII and they responded by another back-stabbing, which is why we ended up in Korea and Vietnam).

This is what comes of having no common sense.

The reason you never hear of OPEC anymore is because the U.S. destroyed it by becoming more energy-independent (and we are going to be completely energy-independent in several more years). And when I was in my teens OPEC was always in the news because the cost of gas had skyrocketed (meaning from 32 cents a gallon to over a dollar), gas stations were closed on certain days and cars had to wait in line for an hour, which led to fights between drivers. When’s the last time you saw that? When I was a teenager, that’s when. Those days are gone.

I can remember when Carter wore sweaters in the White House and turned down the thermostat and urged everyone else to do the same. To save oil because we were running out of it (apparently we have only used 1% to 2% of the oil and natural gas in the world).

Economics used to be called “political economy” because it was a combination of economics and political science. That was more realistic.

What’s even more realistic is to take into account culture, race, religion and ethnic group (the idea that Africans, with a mean IQ of 70, are going to survive and flourish in countries that have a mean IQ of 100, defies all common sense).

That reminds me that “Muhammad Ali,” (who unwittingly named himself after the biggest Muslim slaver of his era) who had an IQ of 78 in high school, was listed as “borderline retarded” and admitted he could barely read and write. I’ve dealt with many such stupid people and have found they can’t add or subtract either. “Five take away seven” leaves them dumbfounded.

I recently read an article that Trump’s father told him his family’s success was genetic, and that Donald Trump said he inherited his “good brain.” And Trump is German/Swedish.

I’ve read quite a few older novels, such as Gone with the Wind and The Shepherd of the Hills, and there were comments in them about how people were more concerned with breeding horses and dogs than better people.

Flooding the country with people of different races, different religions, different ethnic groups and different cultures is going to have decided dysgenic effects on the United States and Europe. It’s already started in Europe, which has lead to a backlash. One that’s going to get a lot worse.

Not that “professional” economists understand this. And that’s one of the main reason they don’t know what they’re talking about and why I ignore them. They think people are just interchangeable workers, like cogs in a machine.

Talk about deluded.

14 comments:

Lab Guy said...

I lost respect for Krugman when he babbled some stupidity years ago about how we need to pretend we will be attacked by space aliens and use that as pretext to dump money into the economy.

I have a great deal of regard for the Austrian school though a some of their members have a blind spot with the IQ issue and open borders.

I would not say the following are economist in the traditional sense but make more sense than the establishment ones like Krugman and Stigliz: David Stockman, John Hussman, Marc Faber, James Grant, Jim Rogers, Bill Gross, and a few others who can use some sense.

I'm still baffled by economist who disparage the gold standard which basically worked to a large degree but no have answer as to why many national banks have these enormous gold holdings. If gold and other precious metals are not good money, why do these institutions insist on holding it?

kurt9 said...

I've taken economics classes. Economics, particularly macro-economics, is little more than criminal sophistry. Micro-economics has some validity because it is firm-based. How do you make a profit doing whatever activity you are doing. The rest of it is garbage.

This is doubly true for "strategic management consulting". I took a class in this gettimg my MBA in 1990 and came to the conclusion that it was BS. My wife took essentially the same class 20 years later, also in pursuit of a business degree, and came to the same conclusion about it as I did.

I read Stockman's book "The Great Deformation". His book is what convinced me that all of the management consultancies as well as the private equity fund management types are nothing more than the corporate equivalent to house flippers. It is the Greenspan/Bernanke/Yellen cheap money policy that has driven all of this over the past 20+ years.

kurt9 said...

The only thing Krugman ever got right was when he said in the mid 90's that the economic growth in South East Asia was due to increased utilization of human labor and natural resourses and not due to improved human capital, unlike the other East Asian economies (Japan, Taiwan, etc.) and that it would soon stop.

In other words, Paul Krugman discovered HBD! Malay people do not have the same capabilities as the Chinese! What a discovery!

Paul Krugman has been wrong about everything else.

Anonymous said...

@Bob, check out these websites:

https://mythfighter.com

(Rodger Malcolm Mitchell wants open borders and wants to give everybody free money - What could possibly go wrong? He is a Jew by the way. He actually wrote a book titled: Free Money, Plan for Prosperity.)

On Modern Monetary Theory (MMT):

http://mikenormaneconomics.blogspot.com

Warren Mosler's website:

http://moslereconomics.com

http://moslereconomics.com/2009/12/10/7-deadly-innocent-frauds/

little dynamo said...

I took Economics in college -- total nonsense, a little like Law, in which people create an entire language and sub-culture around their pet theories, then ride them to 'careers'. Most real-life economics follow a few simple principles, not higher math. Higher math in economics is just another obfuscation to pet the pride and pocketbooks of 'economists'. People want to be Experts, and they want to be paid and preened for being Experts, except in Economics (as elsewhere) the Experts add NOTHING to the understanding or value of the system. They'd be better utilized as celery-pickers in the fields, at least that would contribute something tangibly constructive, instead of more double-talk, World Conferences, and related bullshit.

Modern people believe in this Economics mumbo-jumbo, lol. It's just another false-priestcraft of PhD. cognoscenti, that The People will believe these folks actually know what's going on, are in control, etc. But of course they don't know what's going on, and aren't in control. Might as well get paid for that while you're doing it!

Unknown said...

Economics is the sociology of Accounting. Its who-whom and the Mathematics is just smoke and mirrors to hide the hands behind the curtain. The Central Bank is just Zardoz, a false god who promotes wars and arms warlords to enrich itself. As General Smedley Butler said,"All Wars are Banker Wars."
Macroeconomics is Voodoo Economics. All transactions happen between parties. Irregardless of how many parties or middlemen are involved it has no inherent structure beyond the transaction. Their is no Economic System. All wages are economies of scale, and all trade is paid off either with value or labor. Trade imbalances are settled either with debts or job losses irregardless of what the Wizards of Wall Street say.
The Gold Standard is a red herring. Money does not need coinage with intrinsic value. Our problems come not from not having a backing of Gold or Silver, but due to the bad faith of bankers issuing debt instead of currency. The Federal Government can never balance the budget with the US Dollar in the hands of a Cabal of Hidden Oligarchs. This den of thieves has looted our wealth, corrupted our culture and means to pollute our gene pool. They must be rid of, sooner rather than later.

Eduardo the Magnificent said...

Like most "experts", the job of the modern economist is to take a simple subject and make it sound as complicated as possible, that way you have to hire them permanently to explain things to you. It's a jobs project, nothing more.

Robert What? said...

The only economist I read anymore is Aaron Clarey.

Anonymous said...

Micro economics is useful because it seeks to describe reality. Macro-economics isn't useful because it seeks to make reality conform to the desires of economists in order to achieve some utopia. Macro-economics is all pretend. It's nothing but a construct pretending to manage the transactions described in micro-economics by measuring parameters that can't be measured and in many cases don't actually exist. It's an utter scam.

Anon said...

The first rule of economics should be as follows


"Economics does not exist in a vaccum"

Take The Red Pill said...

The only kind of genuine "free money" is money that is valueless and isn't wanted by anyone. A perfect example is the money printed by The Confederate States of America after they were defeated by the US Federal Government.
(Ironically, that same Confederate money is now in high demand by collectors, and is actually worth something.)

Scotsman said...

Come on Bob!! Trump is German/Scottish.

Unknown said...

I thought she said he was German/Swedish. I prefer Scottish myself. My last name, you know.

Scotsman said...

http://www.newyorker.com/news/news-desk/donald-trumps-immigrant-mother

Why do you think he's so cheap? ;)