09-13-2017, 10:25 AM
(09-12-2017, 09:06 AM)Bob Butler 54 Wrote: This is what I meant by people making entirely different assumptions to get to results they had decided on ahead of time. The math isn't at fault. Just, both sides can reach for results that make them happy but dissatisfy the other. If people can throw away things like climate science and evolution, do you expect happy times with economics? While both factions will make claims to connections with reality, partisanship can and will trump science.
I can agree with this to a point. I can't agree that ideas that have been tested and shown wrong are still viable alternatives to ones that have held up. We can argue causation versus correlation, and those are real arguments. Economics has a lot of hysteresis that makes those arguments hard to resolve. But expecting A and getting A' is a lot harder to support, and the Business Cycle economists (AKA Freshwater School) have a had a particularly bad run -- especially following the 2008 crash.
Yet here we are, talking yet again about cutting business and investment taxes to trigger growth. I would think the Kansas experiment alone would give pause to that argument, but it's a zombie. It won't die.
Intelligence is not knowledge and knowledge is not wisdom, but they all play well together.