Jurriaan: > This is a radical anti-reductionism. The problem is that if everything > causes everything else, it makes causal analysis impossible, since by > that very fact it becomes impossible to specify how everything causes > everything else. It's a banality which is given an air of profundity. > All we are left with is metaphysical speculations about social order > and social change, which are never empirically verifiable.
And this is what is happening! Does supply determine demand or demand determine supply? Just before the collapse of the dot.com bubble, many equity analysts promoted many stocks that they thought "shit" in the private and many "individual investors" followed their recommendations although some of them might thought "shit" in the private, as well. What is the direction of causality: were the analysts responding to the demands of the investors or were the investors reponding to the supply of the analysts? This is the current state of econometrics in my view! Sometime in the past, I helped a loved one with a take-home the exam (shame-shame!) and the professor asked that loved one if he could use the (my) solutions in the future to help his students, since he thought that they were interesting. It was that professor who said this: "The experiments of statistics are repeatable but the experiments of econometrics are not. This is the difference between the two!" My summary of what he said is that life is a non-repeatable experiment! So, econometrics is a hopeless business! Best, Sabri _______________________________________________ pen-l mailing list [email protected] https://lists.csuchico.edu/mailman/listinfo/pen-l
