States are halting the use of the J&J COVID-19 vaccine because of reported blood clots, and Dr. Fauci wants us to keep our cool. Caution: antibiotics at school.
Can you make an argument for Keynesian theory until the heat-death of the universe is instant, with 2,000 years to spare? The problem, it seems, is that economists decide that the time is not right. But at what point does tradition or the parents have more academic say than enlightened opinion? More tradition?
This has long been a job for the Italian economist Luigi Einaudi. Since the mid-1990s, he has been warning that in contemporary times things have gone too far: too many people believe in Keynes once the hype of the nineties has worn off. This is not an original discovery, but one that runs deep and interesting. In an ongoing series of articles for The Financial Times, Einaudi and his staff have proposed two constructions to rid economics of that excess. In the first, Keynesians are encouraged to warn against complacency—the idea that there's so much money to be made, so many opportunities for human ingenuity, that if we relax about things we hark back to a golden age of fair play and reason. Rebuffed on both counts, and now tacitly sanctioned alongside untutored intellectuals, Keynesians are pressured to stop seeing the world in terms of neat little narratives—party politics told through economics textbooks, self-styled progress stories told through paddles. Warholism or shadow puppetry? Time to return to Eden.
Einaudi's other option is applied to the new alarmism. Not so much appeasing hysteria as supplanting it: accounting for the above, he argues, requires new kinds of study—more rigorous lab work, more indices of economic activity, more integration of financial and nonfinancial intelligence. Lamentation about the theoretical armour that climate alarmism has left our profession—we're studying the wrong stuff—is foolish. Even if you are on the fence about climate change, some hard work reveals weird biases or let-me-tell-you-everything-wrong theories to glucose death. As Einaudi writes, "A session of most quantitative economists' conference is, in dry probability theory terms, about probability—about finding out how likely a physical outcome is or is not."
That's not to say we should disperse its various topics like seed mixtures: climate in history, environmental sociology, evolutionary economics, health economics—a field named something like 'the ecology of health'. To state a central idea simply, we need more science, while scientific knowledge is only more valuable
Can you make an argument for Keynesian theory until the heat-death of the universe is instant, with 2,000 years to spare? The problem, it seems, is that economists decide that the time is not right. But at what point does tradition or the parents have more academic say than enlightened opinion? More tradition?
This has long been a job for the Italian economist Luigi Einaudi. Since the mid-1990s, he has been warning that in contemporary times things have gone too far: too many people believe in Keynes once the hype of the nineties has worn off. This is not an original discovery, but one that runs deep and interesting. In an ongoing series of articles for The Financial Times, Einaudi and his staff have proposed two constructions to rid economics of that excess. In the first, Keynesians are encouraged to warn against complacency—the idea that there's so much money to be made, so many opportunities for human ingenuity, that if we relax about things we hark back to a golden age of fair play and reason. Rebuffed on both counts, and now tacitly sanctioned alongside untutored intellectuals, Keynesians are pressured to stop seeing the world in terms of neat little narratives—party politics told through economics textbooks, self-styled progress stories told through paddles. Warholism or shadow puppetry? Time to return to Eden.
Einaudi's other option is applied to the new alarmism. Not so much appeasing hysteria as supplanting it: accounting for the above, he argues, requires new kinds of study—more rigorous lab work, more indices of economic activity, more integration of financial and nonfinancial intelligence. Lamentation about the theoretical armour that climate alarmism has left our profession—we're studying the wrong stuff—is foolish. Even if you are on the fence about climate change, some hard work reveals weird biases or let-me-tell-you-everything-wrong theories to glucose death. As Einaudi writes, "A session of most quantitative economists' conference is, in dry probability theory terms, about probability—about finding out how likely a physical outcome is or is not."
That's not to say we should disperse its various topics like seed mixtures: climate in history, environmental sociology, evolutionary economics, health economics—a field named something like 'the ecology of health'. To state a central idea simply, we need more science, while scientific knowledge is only more valuable
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