It may be well-written, but after I got halfway through it I realized
that I was getting drowned in unexplained conclusions, so relationships
that were suggested on one page were forgotten after a couple more pages
before they could be pinned down to something specific. I doubt very much
that any human being could keep that many factors in mind and actually
figure out the consequences of having them all active at once. It began
to sound more like someone who had some pet peeves, like “government
meddling,” and was selecting any randomly selected relationships
that seemed to show that governments shouldn’t meddle (or whatever the
pet peeve was).
This is why we need that damned economic model that seems to bore
everyone even to think about. When you do all your reasoning in words
there’s just no way to know if you’re getting it right. It’s too easy to
cherry-pick, retaining all the relationships that support what you think
should happen or be true, while simply not noticing or discarding
those that don’t fit the conclusion you want. A working model won’t let
you do that because everything is out in the open, nothing can be
forgotten, and the reasoning is mathematical instead of verbal – you
can’t bend the conclusions to fit your beliefs without making
mathematical errors.
I can see that this book might serve as the basis for a model. But you
would have to go through it practically sentence by sentence, asking what
variables were being discussed and what relationships among them were
being described. Then you’d have to construct a big network of
relationships to show all the connections that are active, convert to
mathematical functions and variables, and then solve the system of
simultaneous equations. I think the most immediate effect of doing this
or even starting to do it would be to cast serious doubt on what anyone
has said about the system from any standpoint just by stringing words
together.
Best,
Bill
whathasgovernmentdone.pdf (274 KB)
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At 05:48 PM 2/1/2012 -0500, Henry Yin wrote:
Hi Bill,
Saw your post on money. In fact the best introduction I found on
thesubject is this book. [attached] Extremely well
written.