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Levine and Zheng review the evidence: The relationship between economic theory and experimental evidence is controversial. One could easily get the impression from reading the experimental literature that economic theory has little or no significance for explaining experimental results. The point of this essay is that this is a tremendously misleading impression. Economic theory makes […]
Economists often get criticised for trying to emulate physicists by arriving at a set of equations that describe human behaviour. There have been innumerable critiques of that approach and the predictive power of economic models is notoriously poor. This article was written in 1986 but feels as if it could have been written yesterday. …economics, […]
From Rogeberg on rational addiction: Theories of rational addiction make assumptions concerning the choice rule, preferences and beliefs of people, and derive the resulting consumption plans. … Some economists claim support from the famous as-if methodology of Friedman 1953 … which explicitly identifies prediction as the only aim of “positive economics.”…[Such] explanations may prove excellent […]
From Andrew Geddis: National plan to legislate to permit the ongoing “civil detention” of offenders deemed at high risk of future sexual or violent offending even after their jail sentence [is] complete. Civil detention[,] now apparently called “Public Protection Orders”… would thus be a retrospective restriction applied to some prisoners on top of the original […]
Matt blogs every now and then defending economic forecasters and always seems to draw out at least a couple of comments slagging off forecasters for being inaccurate. His reponse is that it’s not the numbers that matter but the qualitative analysis of risks and market direction. His defence came to mind when I was reading […]
As an economic forecaster, the idea of “seeing the future” is no doubt of interest to me. Combined with the fact that I have compared economic forecasting to tarot card reading, it would seem that I have a prior belief that the ability to see the future exists – but in fact, I very much […]