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]

Most social Darwinists make the same mistake about evolution as most people who don't understand evolution do - they think there's a final resting place, a victor, and it's them (either economically or biologically - as capitalist and humans, they're the end point of development). This is one of the things that consistently destroys the predictive power of economic models that are strongly pro-capitalist (like in the Chicago School of Economics or the Austrians or whomever). They confuse the process with the goal, which is wrong twice because the process isn't the goal and there is no goal, hehe. So, I don't agree that their model is very good because that model you describes is not, in fact, their model. Their model ignores thermodynamics entirely and treats economics as though it has no connection to the physical world. It's . . . difficult to describe how bad economics is. The simplest way is that they never let a physical fact get in the way of a prediction.

And you are, of course, entirely right about the census.

[athelind]

You're dead-on, and the error is mine: yes, the graphs look similar, but the hypothesis that supports is the one that I presented: that congruent principles apply in both the ecological and economic systems.

(I'm not going to refer to that as "my" hypothesis, since it's hardly original with me. After all, it goes back at least to Darwin.)

And, yes: both economics and evolution are processes without a goal. It's all adaptation, and short-term success is no guarantee of "progress", or even "stability".

I have read and heard -- though I confess that I haven't read Wealth of Nations -- that Smith himself was not a laissez-faire free-market capitalist. As I understand it, while he saw the power of the market as a social force, and most certainly as a better model for planning than the previously-dominant theory of mercantilism, he also saw that, left to itself, the self-organization process of a free market system would leave a lot of bodies in its wake.

[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

[hafoc]

Y'know, the biggest problem I see with peoples' understanding of Darwinism is that they think it is some kind of a moral decision. If you actually read Darwin, he's writing about the creatures who can adapt taking over from the ones who can't. The idea of continuous improvement toward perfection is more akin to the Great Chain of Being theory, which is 16th Century and theological