Lies, Damned Lies, and Invisible Hands

[athelind]

Warning! Two-topic post!

There's a discussion on CNN right now, where Rick Sanchez is talking to a guy from the Census Bureau about why we have to count everyone instead of using statistical methods to take a sample, and extrapolate the population numbers from there. Evidently, Rick's List is an "audience-driven" show, where Sanchez presents

Comments

[cpxbrex]

Ironically vis-a-vis your comments about statistics, economics models backwards predictions look "accurate" because their obtuse manipulation of the data, hehe. But their backwards predictions have no real forward predictive power, largely for ideological reasons - it is assumed that modern capitalism must be correct. And, y'know, they are profoundly ignorant of other fields, just reprehensibly ignorant. They're very much the guys who like statistics with no baseline measurements. They're the same people!

I've read an abridgment of Wealth of Nations and some other stuff by Smith and . . . it varies. He changed over time. I think the fairest way to say it is that he didn't understand where deregulated capitalist markets would end up. His view of things was largely that of craftsmen working in shops they owned, producing things in free competition with each other. He didn't seem to know or understand what was obvious to many of his contemporaries that this would lead to almost immediate centralization as greedy people with a little money used that to leverage their property into monopolies. He just didn't seriously deal with the tendency for wealth to strive towards monopoly, AFAIK.