Not convinced that an article which mentions religion more times than it mentions risk and doesn't mention growth expectations at all tells us very much...
But then, these navel-gazing critiques of capitalism only work in a vacuum. Why do these men in suits assemble in these temples of finance to perform these arcane rituals, to utter these numerical incantations? It's weird, right? They must be searching for god, or maybe they never got enough love growing up. Couldn't have anything to do with actual human experience telling us that the market is the most resilient and efficient (if not always the most fair) way of deciding, as a society, how to employ our scarce resources in a useful way. The people who buy and sell abstract claims on collective human endeavours must do so out of some deep-rooted spiritual malaise and it can't be related in any way to their own very mundane desire to put food on the table and maybe even spend a couple of weeks a year in a tropical location with people they love.
No, we should probably get rid of all this weird ideological baggage. (What do we replace it with? Oh, that's not my department...)
You're missing the point of the essay actually. It's like complaining that an essay written by an atheist about church doesn't talk about sin and salvation.
No, I'm entirely getting the intended point of the essay, I just think that missing the 101 stuff makes the point that the author doesn't understand the subject matter he's attempting to do a hatchet job on.
Think it is because he is saying the 101 stuff is bunk, so why try to use the bunk to disprove the bunk. Like if a physicist is trying to convince a true religious believer there isn't a god, doing it by quoting the bible is often not very effective.
The way to convince people the 101 stuff is bunk is to refer to the 101 stuff correctly, and explain why it doesn't work (or alternatively, come up with a better model), not to try to explain how some of it, fail to acknowledge other parts and imply there are gaps in it.
Quoting the Bible is one of the more common methods of arguing against it or beliefs [purportedly] based on it, and certainly a better way of arguing against the coherence of the Christian model of salvation than writing an article about "the ritual of salvation" that makes a lot of disparaging comparisons to sun gods and talks a lot about Abraham but seems unaware that the Christian model of salvation actually revolves around Jesus
You are correct, I posted to fast. I retract post.
I do often think the best way to convince people to not be Christian is to have them read the Bible. Most Christians have no idea what they believe in, and don't know what is in the Bible (like in US where they think Jesus was pro-Gun, kill thy neighbor). Just reading the Bible is enough to convince people to not be Christian.
So, if I take this reasoning back to Economics. Maybe people do have a lot of false beliefs about Economics, and if they would study it, they would realize it is bunk, and turn away from it?
[EDIT POST]
Changing bit more. Because it really is where the person is at in their learning. There are plenty of Christians that want to persecute Trans Kids, and reading the Bible is not going to convince them they shouldn't (even though Jesus). But maybe when they learn more about Jesus they will stop wanting to kill people.
It is about the learning.
If you indoctrinate kids into a cult at Bible School, how are they supposed to know it is wrong? They a fresh young minds to be imprinted.
Same with Econ 101. Freshman, just starting out, they are learning. They are not already experts, so going to study Economics and immediately see through it all as bunk.
So guess you need some expertise in the bunk, to refute the bunk. But that all takes a lot of energy.
I mean, freshman taking economics classes and learning "here's a theory and its assumptions here's a theory of why this may be wrong and are some counter examples" is going to be a lot better informed about the limitations of theories than someone that doesn't. It's a bit like if you want to learn the limitations of models predicting weather, you probably want a meteorology course, not a list of climate sceptic blogs written by people who hate climate models more out of political objection to their implications than the detail.
You don't need to take an undergraduate course to understand basics like capitalization (i.e sometimes people value stuff now because they think it will make them more money in future, and people will be willing to sell it for less because they have different expectations, risk tolerance or investment opportunities available to them.. its not exactly one of the more controversial or less practically applied parts of economic theory). But you probably want to read an introductory text, not the guy who pronounces that it's part of the heresy of "economics" and then constructs a straw man version of the theory that actually misses the most important bits.
> I mean, freshman taking economics classes and learning "here's a theory and its assumptions here's a theory of why this may be wrong and are some counter examples"
Indeed, except it not how most eco 101 goes, at all …
> It's a bit like if you want to learn the limitations of models predicting weather, you probably want a meteorology
Except one is actually science, whereas the other is political philosophy which pretends to be science in order to justify its perspective. Studying theology isn't necessary to be able to criticize religion. It can ne useful if you want to give theoligical criticism of religion but that's it.
Ans I say that as someone who's spent 5 Yeats studying economics for the exact reason you mention. It turns out it's ideology all the way down…
And the author is also very familiar with econ 101, he's just not reusing these concepts from the canon, because in fact they're mostly ideological ans not very helpful to understand the real world.
Except that “risks and inventives” aren't laws of physics, they are pieces of the dogma (and worshipers dont usually see the difference between the later and the former: it is the essence of religion to believe the dogma as if it was some kind of transcendantal law)
All of these concepts have predictive power that is proven with hard data every day. And unlike physics, it's one of the most democratic realms of knowledge: if you think that these predictions are wrong, you can make yourself a lot of money.
> All of these concepts have predictive power that is proven with hard data every day
Citation needed™
> if you think that these predictions are wrong, you can make yourself a lot of money.
The market can remain irrational much longer than you can demain solvent
As Keynes summarized it in his “beauty contest” thought experiment, it's not about getting the “real” price that matters, it's about guessing what price the group is going to assign. Being “right” against the crowd gives you no point.
For one person getting away with the big short, there are a thousand that just miss the timing of the crash even though they were right on the underlying analysis.
