jamesz

Economic forecasters aren’t all that bad

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Economists get a lot of criticism for failing to polish their crystal balls thoroughly enough before reading the economy. So how good are people forecasting other complex systems? Physicist types. Real Scientists. Let’s ask a weather forecaster how accurate their forecasts are a couple of days out. Days, not months, quarters, or years.

…if our forecasts are about 60 percent accurate or higher, then we consider that to be a good estimate.

Well, that’s slightly better than flipping a coin.

jamesz

There is no One Model to Rule Them All

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I like the influence that physicists are having on economics. Moving towards agent-based modelling in some areas of the discipline is a great idea. But, in addition to lending their novel insights, some seem to enjoy piling on economics generally. Generally you have to take the good with the bad but Mark Buchanan’s latest article is so shockingly bad that I can’t help picking on it. Read more

Matt Nolan

Discussion Tuesday (on Wednesday)

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Let us see if we can get a little bit of ethics going:

“Social good” is a philosophically unsound notion, made up by economists and policy wonks to justify their own existence.

Once again, remember that these are points for discussion – I am not saying I agree or disagree with them.

Matt Nolan

New Zealand’s sexiest economist: The results are in!!

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Wow.  What a roller-coaster ride that was.  The lead changed hands countless times (as I wasn’t counting), but in the end our sexiest economist poll did have an outright winner.

It is my privilege to announce that the deserved winner of the 2014 New Zealand sexiest economist competition was Read more

Matt Nolan

IMF on redistribution and growth

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Last month I noticed a piece from the IMF “redistribution, inequality, and growth”.  It came out after my post on “Okun’s leaky bucket” and I was pretty happy to see the piece – as it was actual empirical research stating that the policy trade-offs are more complicated than some grand “equality vs efficiency” policy choice.  As they say in their introduction:

It must be borne in mind that the data are particularly scarce and unreliable for redistribution, even more so than for inequality.  Indeed, one possible interpretation of our results is that the data on redistribution simply do not contain enough information to infer a negative (or for that matter a positive) direct effect.

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We should of course be cautious about drawing definitive policy implications from cross-country regression analysis.  We know that different sorts of policies are likely to have different effects in different countries at different times.

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What we find is that we should not assume that there is a big trade-off between redistribution and growth

Read more

Infometrics

Does the “Best Start” policy make sense?

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According to a recent Colmar Brunton poll child poverty and education (which is another policy around the opportunities of the child) are major issues of interest to the public.  Recognition of this had led Labour to announce their Best Start policy a few weeks ago.  But does the policy make much sense?  Gareth Kiernan has his reservations (Infometrics link):

Best Start is a typical case of a policy solution being developed to an inadequately defined problem, mixed up with a dose of admirable sentiments and a sizable helping of realpolitik.  We don’t have a robust definition of poverty, and for children who are not being adequately provided for, it is difficult to arrive at a fair apportionment of responsibility between the family and society.

What are your thoughts?