Stats for nerds
1recommend
7mentions
7people
2019–2023years
14% recommend86% neutral
Mentions per year
What Hacker News says
- I would think the issue is we have to start with what are we solving for exactly?
Max GDP for the country in question?
Max GDP contribution to global GDP for the country in question?
Max global GDP?
Maximize some individual distribution for the country population in question?
Maximize some individual distribution for the global population?
I don't think we can even answer that so it is doomed from the start if we are trying to be objective.
If we start over we should just explicitly admit this field is a type of theater. Like Shiller's Narrative Economics is a good start but that is still pretending to be too scientific.
- It has been a nice experiment to prove our intuition about deflationary currency and hording correct.
The other interesting aspect is in terms of Robert Shiller's narrative economics. What is most interesting to me is that the narrative economics and contagion were able to morph the currency narrative into something else so that the hording became a feature and not a bug in the narrative.
It is interesting how people can call BTC digital gold but disregard the downsides of gold at the same time in the exact same way deflation/velocity was ignored in the currency narrative. Gold was the "new" anti-central banking currency in the 70s that had its crescendo because of narratives and central bank policy at around a $3,200 all time high inflation adjusted price that we can't touch even 40+ years later. At the same time macro conditions were set up to take out that all time high price but BTC itself grabbed so much of that flow from gold.
Following the narrative dispersion that the all time inflation adjusted high for BTC is already in will be fun for years to come.
- Ahh, the times of bimetallism. Bimetallism was the Bitcoin of the times, railroads were the "tech" of the times. Robert Shiller has a very entertaining comparative research between Bitcoin and bimetallism in his book Narrative Economics: https://youtu.be/QV0JrMV5nnc
- I ploughed through Francis Fukuyama's Political Order series this year. I wouldn't say it's my favourite, but it was in some sense uplifting. He writes as though rule of law is a evolutionary certainty. As much as that's largely BS in my view, it's still nice to read.
After 4 years I also finally finished Capital in the 21st Century. My opinion: worth reading by jumping around, not worth reading in linear fashion.
Bruce Pascoe's Dark Emu is worth a read too. It's well researched, but the author does occasionally blur the line between opinion and facts. I attribute it to writing styles. Similar in nature to another book I quite liked in the past - Wisdom Sits in Places, but less focused.
Narrative Economics by Robert Shiller would be unfocused to people who are in the tech industry. Nonetheless, the book serves to give context to people who are textmining. Hopefully some changes to economics arise from this. His understanding of genetic algorithms and selection could do with some work.
- > My advice is similar: live on your base salary, and save a lot of it
To be fair, that comment doesn't exactly align with advising someone against getting a mortgage they can't afford unless they receive a bonus.
I'm currently reading "Narrative Economics" by Shiller and it mentions propaganda historically being fed to the poor/middle classes in regards to saving as much money as possible (so banks could profit or earn commish off it)...I'm by no means against saving/investing money, but your original comment (and the multitude of others that are similar) makes me wonder how much of that propaganda is alive and well today.
- Just a heads up, Robert Shiller's new course in "Narrative Economics: How Stories Go Viral And Drive Major Economic Events" goes live on Coursera early 2020 ;)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yLsG4R8FFOc
If you have quantitative skills, I think an alternative to delving into classical econ theory would be to take a data science approach. A lot of non-parametric stats texts use econ/fin examples. And there is an abundance of datasets available via FRED
https://www.federalreserve.gov/conferences/nontraditional-da...
Best of luck ;)
