Tag Archives: Adam Smith
On Visiting Myopia
Posted by on Apr 13, 2019
This week on Facebook: I add this as part of my 2019 April posts on political and economic themes, in which there are two reprises that are not quite the same as the originals. However, in this post, both the article on Friday and Ian Buckley’s essay Learning from Adam Smith quote the following caution from economic historian John Kenneth Galbraith.
Corporate executives and their spokesmen who cite Smith today as the source of all sanction and truth without the inconvenience of having read him would be astonished and depressed to know he would not have allowed their companies to exist.
My first reprise has minor alterations and he original can be read here, what follows is essentially as it was written. Read more of this post
Economics that don’t add up
Posted by on Mar 20, 2011
Advances of computer technology enable a modern society to model just about anything, something that politicians set great store by. Particularly for its use in macroeconomics modelling, where such modelling can serve as either a Judas goat or a scapegoat. However, the adage of GIGO (garbage-in/garbage-out) still applies , and my experience leads me to the belief that the use of any model validation is functionally dependant more on the desired outputs than on the use of any valid data input. This, in turn, is totally dependant on the modelling process itself. Achieving the desired output is simply a matter of manipulating the input data and, if necessary, the modelling process. For a politician this is already too much detail. What the politician wants is a favourable political result, which is ‘the desired output’ and the ability to offset the blame should things go wrong.
