Hay quien piensa que el Nobel a Fama es totalmente inmerecido
YanisVaroufakis: Economics Pseudo-Nobel 2013 – AnInstinctiveReaction
http://feedly.com/k/1bTqn3f
ThisisNakedCapitalismfundraisingweek. 788 donorshavealreadyinvestedinoureffortstoshedlightonthedarkandseamycornersoffinance. JoinusandparticipateviaourTipJaroranothercreditcard portal, WePayintherightcolumn, orreadaboutwhywe’redoingthisfundraiserandotherwaystodonate, such as bycheck, as well as ourcurrentgoal,onourkickoff post. Andreadaboutourcurrenttargethere.
Yves here. I was going to say a few words about newly-announced recipients of the award known as the Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel, but Yanis Varoufakis beat me to the punch. I’ve taken the liberty of combining his two short posts on this topic. Rest assured that as Varoufakis indicates, that Eugene Fama (one of the three recipients of this year’s prize) was one of the leading proponents of the Efficient Market Hypothesis, which as we discussed in ECONNED, provided critical intellectual support for the idea that markets, particularly financial markets, did an excellent job of price determination and thus should be left to their own devices as much as possible.
ByYanisVaroufakis, professorofeconomicsattheUniversityofAthens. Crosspostedfromhisblog
The moment I heard that Fama and Shiller (together with Hansen) were awarded the latest pseudo-Nobel in Economics, my initial thought was: What next? A Darwin Prize to some Arch Creationist? The Award for Top Seamanship to the Titanic’s captain?
But then I quickly changed my mind. Awarding this ‘Nobel’ to both Fama and Shiller was a brilliant hedge. One that can only be bested by awarding the Physics Nobel to Galileo and to the Inquisitor who condemned him.
* * *
Readers have requested a summary of the EfficientMarketHypothesis, which is in the news again as a result of the ‘Nobel’ Prize award to Professor Eugene Fama . In what follows the reader can peruse very brief presentations of the triad of toxic theories that undermined macroeconomic logic and helped legitimise the practices that contributed no end to the Crash of 2008. They are: the RationalExpectationsHypothesis, Eugene Fama’s EfficientMarketHypothesis and the so-called Real BusinessCycleTheory…
[The desciription below is an extract from Chapter 1 of my Global Minoatur]
The type of economics which dominated the thinking of influential people (in the banking sector, the hedge funds, the Fed, the ECB, everywhere) was no more than a thinly veiled form of intellectual fraud which provided the ‘scientific’ fig leaf behind which Wall Street tried to hide the truth about its ‘financial innovations’. They came with impressive names such as the EfficientMarketHypothesis (EMH), the RationalExpectationsHypothesis (REH), Real BusinessCycleTheory (RBCT). In truth, they were no more than impressively marketed theories whose mathematical complexity succeeded for too long in hiding their feebleness.
ThreeToxicTheoriesUnderpinningpre-2008 EstablishmentThinking
EMH: No one can systematically make money by second-guessing the market. Why? Because financial markets contrive to ensure that current prices reveal all the privately known information that there is. Some market players overreact to new information, others under-react. Thus, even when everyone errs, the market gets it ‘right’. A pure Panglossian theory!
REH: No one should expect a theory of human action to predict well in the long run if it presupposes that humans systematically misunderstand that very theory. No doubt, this sounds radically anti-patronising. It assumes that not much light can be shed on society by theorists who believe they understand its ways better than Joe Blog. But note the sting in the tail: For REHto hold, it must be true that people’s errors (when they predict some economic variable, e.g. inflation, wheat prices, the price of some derivative or share) must always be random; i.e. un-patterned, uncorrelated, untheorisable. It only takes a moment’s reflection to see that the espousal of REH, especially when taken together with EMH, is tantamount to never expecting recessions, let alone crises. Why? Because recessions are, by definition, systematic, patterned events. However surprising when they hit, they unfold in a patterned manner, each of its phases being highly correlated with what preceded it. So, how does a believer in EMH-REH respond when her eyes and ears scream to her brain: Recession, Crash, Meltdown? The answer is: By turning to RBCT for a comforting explanation.
RBCT: Taking EMHand REH as its starting point, the theory portrays capitalism like a well-functioning Gaia. Left alone, it will remain harmonious and never go into a spasm (like that of 2008). However, it may well be ‘attacked’ by some ‘exogenous’ shock (coming from a meddling government, a wayward Fed, heinous trades unions, Arab oil producers, aliens, etc.) to which it must respond and adapt. Like a benevolent Gaia reacting to a large meteor crashing into it, capitalism reacts efficiently to exogenous shocks. It may take a while for the shockwaves to be absorbed, and there may be many victims in the process but, nonetheless, the best way of handling the crisis is by letting capitalism get on with it, without being subjected to new shocks administered by self-interested government officials and their fellow travellers (who pretend to be standing up for the common good in order to further their own agendas).
To sum up, toxicderivatives were underpinned by toxiceconomics which, in turn, were no more than motivated delusions in search of theoretical justification; fundamentalist tracts that acknowledged facts only when they could be accommodated to the demands of the lucrative faith. Despite their highly impressive labels and technical appearance, economic models were merely mathematised versions of the touching superstition that markets know best, both at times of tranquillity and in periods of tumult.
shared via http://feedly.com