econ

I am doing reading on agricultural/applied economics in my spare time and came across this gem of an interview. Lots of classical logic errors (straw man arguments, omitting/distorting facts, replying on anecdotes), and this man gets paid huge amounts of money.


My favorite comment on it was the following:

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As a farmer (completely unsubsidized), I always wonder how it is that economists can continually get it wrong and still get a paycheck. Look at the housing crisis — less than two years ago, most economists still would not admit that the housing market was a bubble. Somehow, they found data to support their beliefs. Six months into the crisis, they said the market had hit bottom. Now, they are saying the bottom is still not in sight.

Every year when I plant my crops, I have to use a combination of experience, research, and guesswork. If I get it wrong, I don’t get paid that year. I would love to see economists — especially free marketers like the author of this piece and his friends at the AEI — voluntarily shift to get paid on commission. That is, if they get it right, they paid, if they don’t, tough luck. Maybe then economists would finally have a REAL incentive to provide us with some answers that will actually benefit us (Aren’t they the ones always telling us how important incentives are?). Otherwise, they should stop pretending to be scientists and just admit that they are flipping coins just like the rest of us.

Economists at the University of California and other public institutions are making six figure salaries on the public dime. At least the subsidized farmers are providing something useful for the tax money. Get a real job and then maybe you’d actually understand something about how the economy really works.
— Paul

And then he wrote:

When are we going to see the study detailing the potential savings to the U.S. economy by outsourcing all of our economic research to India? I hear the environment in India is much more conducive to producing good economic research, at a fraction of the cost that we spend doing it here.
-Paul
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Probably the biggest problem with the kind of agriculture many economists are promoting (large-scale) is the inherent lack of biodiversity in the system and the non-sustainability of that system. You want more biodiversity, you need lots of smaller, preferably organic farms. And you need biodiversity for soil health and sustainability, sufficient nutrients, avoiding pest/weed problems, etc. You can't get away from that in the long-term. But it's not economically beneficial in the short-term because it is less efficient.