Can you believe that this is my 100th Blog? I knew that I was a good bull shitter, but not 100!!!. You would think that I might have saved a good one for my 100th, but it is just like most of the others, very important and significant. Nice title too.
Us humans have been involved with medicine a lot longer than we have economics so I thought that medicine just might have a lesson of some kind for the economists who we seem suddenly to have so many of. Economics was one of my better subjects in both undergraduate and graduate school. But first, I want to deal with medicine. We all know that when a doctor prescribes some type of medicine or treatment, he knows that there could be some kind of side affect. Often these side affects can be potentially fatal and for that reason doctors take an oath to "do no harm" in the treatment of your sickness. Have you watched TV and listened to all the disclaimers about the medicine that they are promoting? If you listen to all the bad aspects, I am surprised that anyone takes any medicine. The bottom line is that there is a downside to most medical treatments. Medicine is up front with the risks. They know that medicine is "not" and exact science even though there has been a lot more research into health and medicine than there ever has been into economics. Doctors seem to be a lot more honest than economists.
Now for the economists. We always hear about Econ 101 like is was the class that told all about economics. Think about this, if one class in Econ 101 could give us all the answers about economics, then why are we wasting all this time on advanced courses in economics? Economics in most colleges is about equal to the general science class that you took in high school. Now how much science to you think you really learned in that class back in high school compared to the total knowledge of science? I would not even count it at 1%. Economics is not only complex, it is always changing. All examples used to explain economics are, at best, over simplified special cases. In Econ 101, Keynes is always brought up as the "foundation" or the "father of economics". Anytime you ever hear anyone say that they fully understand economics, you know they are stupid or are lieing. It is like a preacher saying that he knows what God is thinking. Early in life, I found out that, "the more you learn about something, the more you know that you don't know". Now in Econ 101 they just teach you enough to make you dangerous to yourself and others. You don't yet know enough to know how much you don't know. Few people who have taken a college class wants to admit afterwards how stupid they are about the subject that they just took, but this is the case this economics.
Getting a little off track here. Now Obama used Econ 101 and the "foundation" by Keynes based on really rough untested models to "bet the farm" with his stimulus package. He bet the farm. If this were a doctor, he would have said that, either this medicine is going to cure you or it is going to kill you. The stimulus was supposed to "reduce" the impact of a recession or depression, not cure it. The problem was that even if it worked, at some point we were going to have to pay the money back. To be able to pay it back, the plan would have to have worked much better than to have just made a recession better. We have been thru recessions and depressions before, but we never bet the farm during any of them. With the farm, we could have always, at least, put food on the table. Now we stand a good chance of losing the farm. Doctors always discuss the down side and it implications. Why don't economists?
Think about another thing with medicine. Notice how they do all these "double blind" tests? Notice how often a treatment that sounds so good and has such strong "correlation" with good results turns out to be worthless when "double blind" tested? Did you know that there has "never" been a "double blind" test of any concept in economics? That is right, none. Recall my Blog on education where I showed that the Head Start Program produced "zero" improvement in scores? Remember that? Economics has this kind of thing written all over it. Economists use "Archery" logic. That is where they search out results and draw the target about the results and claim that they know exactly why the arrow went into the bulls eye. This is not science, it is Bull Shit. I don't have time or space here, but it is the same with Psychology. Like economics Keynes, psychology had their Sigman. Notice also that all this Bull Shit originated in our colleges and universities. Notice that the transistor was not discovered in any college or university for was the first man powered flight. Maybe we have found the source of the problem.
