At 05:38 PM 04/23/2001 -0500, Jim Choate wrote:
>On Tue, 24 Apr 2001, Faustine wrote:
> > What about econometrics? It seems to belong in the same conceptual
> category
> > as mathematics, statistics, operations research, etc. I dont think
> > econometricians would generally appreciate being called softies...
>
>If by 'econometrics' you mean 'take real world data and try to fit models
>to it' then I'd say it clearly is a science. A science is the process, not
>the thing it's applied to. It's a way of viewing the cosmos. It has all the
>requirements including repeatability and predictability, neither of which
>'economics' has. I like derivative junkies. If on the other hand you mean
>'take your pet theory and munge data until it fits', no thanks. THAT's the
Perhaps the field has changed since I was in college, but back then,
academic econometrics had the reputation of being dominated by Marxists -
the more-Scientific Socialists who understood that if you want a
centrally planned economy, you have to measure it so you can control it,
as opposed to the purely political Scientific Socialists who believed in
centrally planning an economy based on class struggle and rewarding
heroic truck factory workers and shooting bourgeois greedy bankers and
other warm fuzzy liberal values stuff.
While the US government doesn't strongly believe in central planning,
it has still supported that kind of field because if you want to
spend lots of money, either on liberal welfare state programs,
right-wing Anti-Commie military-industrial-complex welfare programs,
or good old fashioned bi-partisan pork for your friends,
you need to know how and where to squeeze the economy to maximize
revenue without overly disrupting the processes that generate it.
Econometrics aims to let you know precisely at which angle to hold the
taxpayers by the ankles and how fast to shake them up and down
to get the money to fall out without either ripping their socks off and
dropping them on the floor or alternatively leaving their hands free
to grab their wallets with. Because of the emergent properties of markets,
this is a dynamic process, requiring full-time continuous employment of
econometricians to say "speed up... slow down... a little to the left..."
rather than the traditional Socialist Glorious Five-Year Plan
which makes up-front predictions and doesn't keep tracking how they're doing.
