The letter from 77 economists to the Guardian, based on a blog here on Wednesday, made it to the front page of the Guardian:
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I hope this gets picked up by the broadcasters and repeated in their bulletins today, like the business leaders’ Telegraph letter before the election.
I am on press standby for that – no calls so far…
Won’t happen; mediamacro captured.
Solution? Promote, support, read, tweet, share, ‘Like’ authoritative alternative sources of information. Until we do this successfully the owners of national media sources will continue to warp the Overton window.
Start now.
Agree
It’s American and I don’t advocate joining whatever the Coffee Party is but this gives a flavour of media concentration;
https://www.facebook.com/coffeeparty/photos/a.313395813326.193473.304981108326/10153611089193327/?type=1&theater
Congratulations Richard, the time had to come where your passage into the club of top economists was truly recognised. And to have them agree on a smegsage what is basically your blog words, you must feel like the cat that licked the cream!
It is a bit like getting multiple As on your work
But that takes me back a very long way
‘Top’ economists equals ones that agree with you?
Is that comment meant to mean anything?
If so you have some way to go in learning how to communicate
What economics qualifications do you have?
BSc in Business Economics and Accountancy
Fedllow of the Institute of Chartered Accountants in England and Wales
That’s barely a credible qualification to call yourself an ‘Economist’, and you’ve always boasted about how you never never listened to your economics lectures as they were ‘wrong’.
Are the qualifications of the other 76 economists on the list equal as poor?
Have you bothered to notice the qualifications of the others who seemed happy to have me in their number?
I doubt it, because it is clear you’re intent on spouting Worstall
Which is why this is your last comment
Indeed, as regards the Overton window – this was EXACTLY Ed Milliband’s experience in the last Question Time pseudo-debate (pseudo, because Cameron never faced up to a direct one-ton-one debate), when Ed Milliband’s assertion that Labour had NOT overspent – which, as, Richard has often demonstrated, and as Polly Toynbee argues in the Guardian at http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2013/jul/02/labour-spending-worked-blair-brown-stealth, is no more than the sober truth – Ed Milliband’s truthful assertion was met with “gasps of surprise” in the audience (amongst whom were Tory plants, set to ambush Ed M on exactly this point), because truth had been successfully portrayed as an untruth, exactly as the untruth of Osborne’s masterful management of the economy had been portrayed as a truth.
However, I have little sympathy for Ed on this point, as he was urged by, inter alios, John Prescott and Alistair Campbell – people who really DO know how to campaign – to confront the Tory lie about Labour “wrecking the economy” as early as October 2010, and failed to do so, thus sealing his fate.
He forgot Orwell’s dictum “He who controls the present, controls the past; he who controls the past, controls the future”, and chose instead to concentrate on facing the future, rather than dealing with the past, and paid the price – as did the whole country – accordingly.
Labour really MUST – if it is to serve ANY useful purpose at all, and not merely wither, as the Liberal Party did within less than 20 years of its stunning 1906 landslide victory – it MUST confront, and contradict, this lie, and recapture the past.
Consequently, any Leadership candidate who strays into the trope of “apologising for Labour’s overspending” will NOT get my vote, if I am still a Party member by then – something very open to question.
The sole anti austerity Labour hopeful Jeremy Corbyn Labour MP Islington North only got anywhere near that challenge by a successful 38 Degrees petition, that gained the nrequired 5000 signatures.
There is a new 38 Degrees to get the public to sign in large numbers to encourage the undecided around 86 Labour MPs to endorse Jeremy Corbyn, as he needs at least 35 MPs to get going in the leadership contest.
https://you.38degrees.org.uk/petitions/switch-your-nominations-to-jeremy-corbyn
Jeremy Corbyn will be on the march organised by The People’s Assembly in London on Saturday June 20th.
So proving his anti austerity credentials. He was also photographed with Vanessa Redgrave.
Regardless as to whether he is just trolling or not, to be fair to ‘Wild Bill’, there are plenty of reasons to dispute the credibility of many of the names on that list. Certainly I’m as qualified as many of those listed, to be commenting on economics!
Respectfully, I very much doubt your claim
You won’t even admit your name
So shall we stop the stupidity on this one now?
I made my comment on this idea of Osborne’s on Wednesday 10 June, although I was less kind. Utterly daft beyond description.
Must admit I have some sympathy for “Wild Bill”‘s view.
Economics really isn’t a science is it? Most of it is either stating the blindingly obvious or making suppositions that are extremely questionable. I’m not criticising highly intelligent, often brilliant, people like Martin Wolf or Goerge Soros, but even they, it seems to me, are mainly talking common-sense.
Economics can’t be a real science because you can never carry out the experiments to establish absolute laws thAT apply across the board.
These days it mostly seems to be an industry for churning out Tories who’ll go on to work in finance & then do their best to ruin the rest of us (e.g. Mark Field, Mark Garnier, Mark my words it can’t end well).
Its like Psychiatry/analysis etc. They can claim what they want but they have no real idea how a mind works. They’ll propose, say, a talking cure & it might, sometimes, work but then, in the c16th, when the doctor told someone to kill a cat & swallow its tongue, sometimes that might cure their eczema. The point is that, until the late c19th, no-one had any controlled understanding of what might work & why & that’s exactly the state of psychoanalysis today.
And you think that science does know it all?
And that there are no contentious issues?
Or theories that are found to be unproven?
Sorry – all you’re actually saying is the search for knowledge is incomplete, at best. Does that invalidate the search?
Richard, three comments on eriugenus’s comment.
1. Picking up on your last point, he forgets Gödel’s incompleteness theorem.
2. Again, picking up on your last point, his assertion that economics is not a science is only valid if we use the term “exact science”. However, many inexact sciences, like economics, sociology, jurisprudence, and indeed eriugenus’s example of psychiatry and psychology, use the scientific method of collecting and assessing evidence for an hypothesis, which can be tested to some extent. To cast aside economics in this way sounds like an echo of the infamous Sir Keith Joseph, who sought to exclude sociology from the British education system, on the grounds of its not being a ” science”.
3. Finally, any suggestion that economics is just “common sense” must give way to the fact of a) the dense in penetratingly of the practitioners of mathematically grounded economics and b) the counter-intuitivr nature of much of economics in matters such as debt, deficit, austerity and expenditure, wonderfully caught in Maynard Keyenes’s “paradox of thrift”.
Returning to the 77, it seems to me that each of them has more than adequately demonstrated their academic bona fides, either in proven academic attainment and qualification, or meaningful comment and explanation of economic realities, or both. Quibbling about the issue is a meaningless exercise in that case
Quibbling about such things is a classic distraction tactic, often practised by some who post on this blog (though not by Eriugenus), aiming to take readers’ eyes of the main point, which in this case is the asinine nature of Mr Osborne’s proposals.
Reminds me of similar letter published around the time of Osborne’s ’emergency’ budget in 2010 which was scoffed at by John Rentoul.
He pointed to a similar letter published in the early 80s by 300 economists which attempted to portray a similar message and which is now seen, wrongly, as an example of experts getting it wrong and Tory chancellors as vindicated economic sages.
Given May’s disastrous election result, I wonder what good these letters do.
They are lines in the sand
You remember them
They inform debate
Some people learn from them
A few minds may be changed
And if so there is rejoicing in heaven (that’s a metaphor, in case of doubt)