Via Will Wilkinson, James Pethokoukis at US News considers the state of the economy, and draws the same conclusions I did, for exactly the opposite reasons:
My theory is that the amazing resilience of the American economy through this slowdown--as well as the lack of a bad recession in a generation--is indirect proof that the 25-year economic expansion that started in 1982 made us far richer as a nation than the economic numbers suggest. I have continually offered that the inflation numbers used by the government have for years overstated how much prices have risen. Plus, the wage numbers put out by the government are currently being revised to better reflect the shift in jobs from "old economy" to "new economy."
At least we're all in agreement: Economics is not science.
In science a falsified theory is wrong.
In pseudoscience a falsified theory evinces HETEROSKEDASTICITY. Economics, climatology, ecology, psychology, archeology, linguistics... Intense mathematical modeling that extrapolatively fails by observation needs another parameter. Given N points, N-1 parameters constitute fulsome theory. When observation achieves N+1 points, theory demands N parameters.
In religion empirical falsification is a validating test of faith.
Mathematics is not empirical. Anything self-consistent is adequate to study (e.g., string theory).
Mathematics is not empirical. Anything self-consistent is adequate to study (e.g., string theory).
Where were you when I needed defending against string worshipers?
A couple of thoughts:
1) People fixate on gasoline prices way out of proportion to their real impact.
2) Falling housing prices are also interpreted in a bizarrely emotional way. You'd think that when people "lose their homes" the houses are destroyed, not that people who had been renting gets to buy them while the current owners trade places with them. It's viewed as an unalloyed disaster while, as a renter, I can tell you that it has a clear upside.
String theory demands BRST invariance uniting gravitational and inertial effects. Equivalence Principle violation kills string theory (metric gravitation falls to teleparallelism). Violation must be consistent with 400+ years of no violations! observations.
If the vacuum is chiral in the massed sector (a left foot) then chemically identical opposite parity mass distributions (opposite shoes) bell the cat. Demo: Put on two left shoes, close your eyes, walk. Do your feet translate in parallel? Uncle Al says "somebody should look (pdf)." Physics says "looking in a chemical place is silly." After all, mathematical induction plus n^2 - n + 41 generates primes via n = 1,2,3... Adopt a perturbational approach at N = 40 to obtain a polynomial with 10 variables and degree 10^45 that works*. Does that sound stringly familiar?
A New Kind of Science, Stephen Wolfram, (C)2002, p. 1162.
J Singer, if you are talking about the cost of filling up a car with gasoline, that's not the issue. As I'm sure you know, virtually everything you buy in a store has been transported by a truck that burns a petroleum product. When the price of fuel rises, it means that the price of transportation rises. When the price of transportation rises, the price of products rise. I am, of course, ignoring the fact that virtually everything you buy in a store was produced using energy generated at least in part by petroleum fuels. So, the price of virtually every product anyone buys is directlyinfluenced by the cost of fuel. How is it possible to "fixate on gasoline prices way out of proportion to their real impact"?
How is it possible to "fixate on gasoline prices way out of proportion to their real impact"?
I understand that that the total impact of rising petroleum prices goes well beyond the direct results of increasing retail gasoline prices. I can't imagine, though, why you think it's therefore impossible to exaggerate that total impact. Why on earth shouldn't it be possible?!?