Pete Vincent:
>I think I can provide a lot of good reasons, though unfortunately I
>don't currently have time to expound them in detail. But to be brief,
>if you have a robust model, you can use it as a test of all sorts of
>things. Once you've determined that your model is somewhat trustworthy
> - money and goods flow around the world, people get paid, etc.
>(and you have some measure of the degree, which you can state in your
>results) - you have an experimental field to excercise projections.
>When some orthodox economist says "everyone knows you can't introduce
>[this or that] reform because it will cause the economy to derail
>completely, and all hell will break loose. No, you must follow our
>sage pronouncements and keep playing the game according to our rules"
>then you can say "OK, let's just see if that's really true", and
>introduce the reform in the simulation. etc.
Pete, there are ever so many good models already. The good ones, those that
have been carefully designed to include some awareness of how the economy
functions and which have yielded policy useful results, would be accepted as
valid by most if not all economists. I'm sure there is always a need for new
ones, but even these would have to be based on some understanding of
economic fundamentals. What I do not see in Mr. Wilson's stuff is an
understanding beyond the production of another CIA Factbook.
I do have a quarrel with your use of the term "orthodox economist". Orthodox
in what sense? The Marxist, the Classical, the Austrian, the neo-classical,
the Keynesian, the post-Keynesian, the Monetarist, etc. etc.? My point here
is that I really don't think there ever was such a thing as an "orthodox
economist". There were, and still are, many different schools, many
different ways of thought. However, there is a similarity among these in the
sense that all economists are interested in things like labour, capital,
natural resources and the constraints on their use, enterprise, government
fiscal processes, the role of money, the allocation of resources among
alternative uses, the distribution of income and wealth (and power), the
process (good or bad) of growth, etc., and, of course, how all of these
things (and others) might fit together to impact on our day to day lives and
future progress (which may or may not mean "growth", depending on whom you
ask). Build a good model which incorporates some of these things (all would
probably be too difficult) and the world would beat a path to your door. The
unorthodox would come along with the orthodox - the shaggy wildmen along
with the pin-striped suits. I repeat, I did not see a recognition of this in
Mr. Wilson's proposal.
Ed Weick
P.S.: Though I recognize I'm being charitable here, I would include Jay
Hanson in the company of economists because of the things he thinks about.
However, I would grant that he would be among the most unorthodox of
economists.
