There are dozens of papers in the behavioural finance literature which link stock price movements and traders' behaviour to phases of the moon; I haven't seen any specifically on zodiac astrology, but given the general tendency of the BP literature to dredge through correlations of more or less everything in the world with equity returns, I'm sure it's out there.
I have been using this argument, btw, as a way of annoying Popperians for the last five years. It's completely clear that astrology is a science by the Popperian criterion - it makes twelve falsifiable predictions every day and prints them in the newspaper. It's also pretty clear that you can't get away from this by moving to some more refined version of philosophy of science like Lakatos' or Kuhn's - it's true that the newspaper predictions are nearly always useless, but astrology ought to be given the same chance as, say, economics, to come up with a rationalisation of its predictive failures and a new version of its theory. The only grounds upon which to reject the claims of astrology to be a science are that it's so transparently full of mumbo-jumbo, which is clearly a sociological criterion - "science" is, at the end of the day, defined as "what scientists do", while "scientist" is defined as "somebody who earns a living as a scientist". best dd > ----- Original Message ----- > From: "Jim Devine" <[email protected]> > To: "Progressive Economics" <[email protected]> > Subject: Re: [Pen-l] astrology > Date: Sun, 10 May 2009 18:58:56 -0700 > > > Dan Scanlan wrote: > > I'm a Scorpio and us Scorpio's don't believe in astrology. > > Nor do we of the Pisces persuasion. > > (By the way, one time I was interviewed by the L.A. Pacifica station > about current events and someone phoned in to ask about astrological > economics. I didn't have time to deal with the question (whatever it > was -- it was many moons ago), so I asked the caller to send me some > literature on this. I received (what seemed to be) a peer-reviewed > journal about astrological economics. I was filled with the standard > prognostication that appears in the business pages of newspapers -- > interspersed with totally irrelevant references to astrology. ) > -- > Jim Devine / "If heart-aches were commercials, we'd all be on TV." -- John > Prine > _______________________________________________ > pen-l mailing list > [email protected] > https://lists.csuchico.edu/mailman/listinfo/pen-l > _______________________________________________ pen-l mailing list [email protected] https://lists.csuchico.edu/mailman/listinfo/pen-l
