Judging by results (at the peak of a cycle)

Judgingbyresults (atthepeakof a cycle)
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Found a link in my Blogger stats to a post by Gabriel Rega:

http://gabrielrega.com/2013/04/24/filtro-de-hodrickprescott-no-excel/

The filtro-de is a dead giveaway that it’s not English. But the hodrick-prescott caught my eye. So I clicked the link.

There is an intro, in Portuguese according to Google Translate. And then there’s an excerpt from my De-Trending post a while back.

Sweet. So I looked around Gabriel Rega’s site some, passing bits of it thru Google’s universal translator. And I came across Darwinsconjecture: resenha, which translates as "Darwins conjecture : review". A book review, according to Rega.

There is an excerpt, but I struggled with it even *after* translation. Something along these lines:

The quest to understand the interconnections of socioeconomic phenomena is recurrent in economic thought. But these ideas have never been the object of systematic treatment. Since Marshall in 1890, various thinkers have found biological analogy to be a shortcut to a fruitful, substantially Darwinian understanding of economic phenomena.

Not sure that’s what the excerpt really says, but it interests me.

Rega’s post links to Economia e SociedadeDarwinsconjecture: the search for general principles of social & economic evolution. So I go there.

No, not English. Just that bit of the post title, about "the search for general principles of social & economic evolution". The English is the title of a book by Geoffrey Hodgson and Thorbjørn Knudsen.

I Googled the title and found Geoffrey Hodgson’s website and brief reviews of the book. From the first of those:

"Both Darwin’s Conjecture and From Pleasure Machines to Moral Communities present a formidable challenge to the previous assumptions of CGE [computable general equilibrium] economics, which is currently under siege on a number of fronts. These books offer a plausible, coherent alternative based on perhaps the most powerful idea of the last two centuries: evolution by natural selection.

Yeah, I’m liking this. An alternative to computable general equilibrium economics? Perhaps an alternative to Dynamic Stochastic General Equilibrium economics? Sure, I’m for that.

And you know, if you are talking about evolution of the economy and I am talking about business cycles within cycles within cycles within the cycle of civilization, then you and I are probably talking about the same thing, from different angles.

The search also turned up a 2-page PDF by Ronnie J. Phillips of the Networks Financial Institute. From the opening:

Ever since Veblen first asked the question “Why is economics not an evolutionary science?” in 1898, his followers have sought an answer to this query.

I can answer that one. It’s not an evolutionary science because of first impressions. The modern study of economics began in the time of Adam Smith, at the beginning of the 150 years that Keynes called the greatest age of the inducement to invest.

For the first hundred and fifty years of economics, economists rode the rising crest of a wave: the wave of the greatest age of the inducement to invest. Everything they did, worked. No matter what they did, it seemed to work. Things continued to improve. They assumed the success was theirs and took credit for it. And some of their ideas today are considered "laws".

Something similar happened in a much shorter time span after the end of the second World War. But things started to go bad in the 1970s and nobody knew why, so things continued to get worse. Things continue to get worse yet today. But time has passed and now people don’t even know it is still the same festering problem.

Anyway, the economic environment of that age allowed economists to assume that their explanations were valid even when they were not. The result today is what we call economics.

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