> I do not consider it "nonsense", as I don't consider most economics > arguments to be "nonsense". Or, to put it positively, I think it makes > as much sense as many other economics arguments that I am familiar > with. Which is to say, plausible, but not entirely convincing, since > contradictory views can also be argued plausibly.
OK, I think I understand your view of this paper. Calling it plausible, but not the only possible explanation does put good boundaries on your evaluation and I very much appreciate your willingness to move a discussion forward by setting those boundaries. So, I contemplated how to move this discussion forward. There are two linked ways that I tend to evaluate this type of paper. First, I try to look at the numbers the author gives and look for other numbers to check his assertions. Second, I look at technique. For the first, I've obtained a source with yearly GDP for the US going back to 1870, and then decade by decade estimates back to 1820. I think this type of number will allow us to look for evidence of at least correlations between government actions and the GDP in the past. Since the hypothesis is given in the paper for correlations between government actions and GDP, one comes to the obvious conclusion that the author can see such correlations. Thus, looking for others that would be predicted by his hypothesis is a most reasonable way to evaluate his hypothesis. Second, you may not know it, but my formal studies have ranged over a wide range of subjects. About a decade ago, I took a graduate seminar course on Persian and Hellenistic Judaism. During the first week, we were assigned two books to read. After that, the professor apologized for assigning one of the books, because it wasn't a good book.as we should have known. When I asked why, he said technique..and went through the evidence for the use of poor technique. I have found this a good general rule for all disciplines that involve exploring the empirical world in any extent whatsoever.that authors that use good techniques are better than authors that use poor techniques. I'll give two examples of techniques by different people in the area of scripture study: one good and one bad. The good one is Raymond Brown's "Death of the Messiah" and the bad one is Spong's "Liberating the Gospels: Reading the Bible with Jewish Eyes." Brown's book usually includes discussions of the various camps on each critical issue, lists the arguments for each camp and then gives his argument. He makes no claim without extensive support for that claim. He has 200 pages of footnotes, about a third of which references works that come to different conclusions than he does. Spong, on the other hand, makes strong statements like "the basic purpose of the gospels is the liturgical following of the Jewish calendar" with minimal evidence. Further, he doesn't even consider the basis for previous arguments, (e.g. arguments that reference the detailed work which examines the structure of Mark's gospel). In other words, he makes claims, cites a couple of random facts that support them, and then declares that previous ideas are just mired in the past. So, I've looked at the work you've cited with these types of criteria. Before going on, it would be worth noting whether you think these are acceptable criteria or if you have other criteria for the verisimilitude of an analysis. Dan M. _______________________________________________ http://www.mccmedia.com/mailman/listinfo/brin-l
