Haggis_McMutton wrote:I've read his first two books. They're ... odd.
He comes off as extremely egotistical in some places and quite insecure in others. Also, he has a weird style of mixing economics, philosophy, and weird semi-biographical metaphors. It makes his books kinda interesting, but also annoying cause it was quite difficult for me to figure out what the hell he was trying to say at times.
Haha, I'm not sure about the metaphors, but I'm used to the first two being intertwined. I'm pretty intrigued about his books, but I better ratchet down my expectations just in case. =P
Haggis_McMutton wrote:Also, he pretty much agrees with you that the current mathematical approaches are bullshit (in one of his more egotistical moments he denounces the Nobel prize in economics as a complete sham), and he actually gives a pretty good reason for why the current system is nonsense (i.e. one of the simplifying assumptions made fundamentally corrupts the models by making the black swans seem orders of magnitudes more unlikely than they really are).
He does propose some alternative math, but without that simplifying assumption, it is completely intractable. At least for now.
If he was wise, he wouldn't reveal the methods used by his investment firm.
re: underlined, this was pointed out roughly 30, maybe 70 years ago. The current economic models give the appearance of stability while recommending solutions based on flawed empirical analysis. They'll advocate for discretionary expansive monetary policy and fiscal policy, which they predict would produce a certain outcome, but these predictions don't account for the fact that human actions and economic plans change over time. There's
so much going on that is neglected. Furthermore, Keynesianism focuses on the short-term yet can't account for the long-term unintended consequences of their previous "solutions."
Much of the dynamic equilibrium models assume weird things like perfect information, no illusion of money, consistent expectations, no transaction costs, perfect competition, all homogenous goods, markets, sellers, etc. Basically, it's similar to assuming that if you wanted something, *boop* like magic, it's there, and you instantaneously distinguished real prices from nominal, you compared all the sellers and their prices, etc.
And hey, if you wanted to sell something, *boop* SOLD at a price which is equal to marginal cost; therefore, total profit = 0. It's really weird but scary that bureaucracies favor this kind of approach and create public polices from them (e.g. antitrust regulation and enforcement, printing money, etc.).
These assumptions overlook the market process, i.e. how the satisfaction of wants is actually produced and attained across many individuals in different markets in a world of dispersed knowledge, where one person possesses only limited information (unlike the equilibrium models). The adjustment mechanism is overlooked and isn't even addressed by many of these economic "scientists." Anyway, I'll stop here.
