What defence do we have against politically-motivated scientists?

[TCO]

Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: What defence do we have against politically-motivated scientists?

Originally posted by Doddler


It only takes a majority. The minority are brushed aside as charlatans or non-credible, despite their work being sound, for example.

The impact is not that contrarians can't be heard, even in premier journals. The main impact is that good scientists avoid publishing at all of the wrong slant because of wanting to get grants. But contrarians who write good stuff can get published, no problem. When you see what a sloppy job they tend to do in both logic and form of publication submissions, it makes one wonder if they really have that much useful to convey on the subjects.

[Ned]

Come on Drogue. You must have a solution to cooling off an overheated economy without causing a recession.

I already suggested one: raise the minimum wage.

[Ned]

There are two reasons for the recession: 1) the budget surplus and 2) the rising interest rates. The economy went in to tailspin in April, 2000. That is when tax payments for all those 1999 profits, especially from stock options, had to be made. The stock market took a bit hit as people sold stocks to make the payments.

The rising interest rates choked liquidity at the same reducing corporate profits that further reduced stock prices. The stock market freefall was reinforced. Soon everything was affected and we were in a recession.

Knowing this, the thing to have done in '99-2000 was to cut taxes and raise interest rate simulataneously. The combination would have thrown us back into a deficit, hopefully, and curtailed inflation. A hike in the minimum wage would have helped slow the economy as well as the increased unemployed due to the increase would have operated as a drag on the economy.

[Imran Siddiqui]

Why in the world would you want to do things that would counteract each other? Tax cuts would counter raising interest rates and vice versa. And then you'd be back to square one.

The way the 90s were going, with a housing and stock bubble, a recession was probably necessary to correct the market. Now if steps were taken in the mid 90s to make sure the market did not overheat, that may not have been the eventual choice, but those things are politically unpopular for the most part.

[Tattila the Hun]

What defence do we have against politically motivated people, in general?

[Meticulous Man]

All science is political

[Imran Siddiqui]

In the midst of the econ discussion, I thought this article came out right on time .

http://www.nytimes.com/2006/12/26/business/26econ.html

December 26, 2006
An Economy of Extremes
By EDUARDO PORTER
Economists have long waxed lyrical about a “Goldilocks economy”— one that is not too hot, not too cold.

In this ideal world, the economy is running so smoothly that there is little risk of it overheating and pushing inflation higher — forcing the Federal Reserve to raise interest rates. Nor is the job market weakening, threatening to plunge the economy into the icy bath of a recession.

The “just right” economy is not often achieved, of course, but lately this bedtime story has taken a particularly tricky turn: it is both too hot and too cold.

The housing market has fallen into a deep freeze; so has the auto industry. Yet on several other fronts, including commercial construction and high-end consumer spending, economic activity appears to be sizzling.

Lombard Street Research, a British economic forecasting firm, recently dubbed the American economy the “anti-Goldilocks economy.”

That is making it challenging for both economists and the Federal Reserve to decide which risk is greater: that housing will drag down the rest of the economy, pushing the Fed to cut rates, or that inflation will remain above the Fed’s comfort zone, forcing it to push up rates instead.

But others say that next year hot and cold could end up canceling each other out, turning the economy balmy.

For now, though, with home construction entering its second year of a downturn, many economists have aggressively pared back their forecasts for growth in 2007. Some have started to utter the R-word.

“We’ve increased the probability of a recession in our forecast to 35 percent,” said David W. Berson, chief economist of Fannie Mae.

On the other hand, Charles Dumas, who follows the American economy for Lombard from London, ticked off a list of countervailing forces from high employment and income growth to robust business investment.

“None of that speaks of a slowdown,” he said. “There has to be a landing but I don’t see any signs of it yet.”

I recommend reading the entire article, as it is interesting on the different beliefs people have on the future economy. Some say 2007 will see 1% growth while others see 3% growth. No one knows how this situation will resolve, with some parts of the economy crashing while others run at high octane. And it shows the problems that policymakers have. Which do you focus on when it is totally muddled how things will go.

[Odin]

Originally posted by Imran Siddiqui


No, that's entirely silly. The long expansion was starting to show signs of overheating by 1995. Remember Greenspan's statement about "irrational exuberance"? People laughed at him then, but he wasn't wrong. The economy was growing waaay too quickly and would have headed for recession regardless to correct the market. Perhaps raising taxes or cutting services in the mid 90s may be brought the growth down to manageable levels, but things were going out of control.

On another forum I post at there was a thread on an economic phenomenon called K-Waves. I was looking through the foum archives and back in a thread from the late 90's a poster who was an economist predicted that the economic boom would end in 2000. Make of that what you will...

[Drogue]

Originally posted by Ned
Come on Drogue. You must have a solution to cooling off an overheated economy without causing a recession.

I already suggested one: raise the minimum wage.

No, there isn't, by definition. If the economy is overheating, it is growing too fast. What do you do to correct an economy growing too fast? You slow it down. Draw a graph, it's quite simple when you see it on paper. You have one line angled up at 3% say, which is the long-run trend in economic growth. You have another that starts to climb at 5%, say. It opens up a gap. Now either you leave it be, when it will climb at 2% above the trend until it reaches a level where the market loses confidence and collapses back to the 3% line, or you adjust the economy, raising interest rates perhaps, and so it grows at 2% for a few years until it hits the 3% line again.

Now, the only time recessions happen are when you've let it go too far. If there's a huge gap and you're worried about an enormous and sudden drop, you could induce a small recession, say a -1% a year fall, meaning you move at 4% towards the long-run line.

But that's my point, there is no massive difference that occurs at 0%. Sure, you call it a recession if it's below and slow growth if it's above, but it's no different than growing at 2% when the long-run trend is 3%. All of them are below-average growth in real terms.

[Drogue]

Originally posted by Ned
Knowing this, the thing to have done in '99-2000 was to cut taxes and raise interest rate simulataneously.

Except as said, they have counteracting effects. Raising the interest rate is precisely what the Fed does if it feels the economy is overheating. It makes borrowing more expensive and saving better value, thus there is less investment in the economy.

In 1999, the US had had a prolonged boom and was well above trend. it was unsustainable. Throwing us back into economic growth would have postponed a worse recession later. Good politics (would have been in Bush's term) but bad economics. I think the economy was pretty fantastically handled through most of the '90s. Greenspan tried to curtail irrational exuberance by raising interest rates slightly, but not enough to throw off the millions of sensibly-spending homeowners who couldn't afford too much of a hike in their mortgage payments. He slowed the growth and lessoned the boom without derailing anything.

[Dinner]

Science has a built in system to weed out political bias. It's called peer review and the righties hate it because the science doesn't agree with their policies.

[Ned]

Originally posted by Oerdin
Science has a built in system to weed out political bias. It's called peer review and the righties hate it because the science doesn't agree with their policies.

Landsea. Landsea. Landsea. Landsea.

[dannubis]

Given the conservative right's past track record he is unfortunately correct you know

[Ned]

Originally posted by Drogue

Except as said, they have counteracting effects. Raising the interest rate is precisely what the Fed does if it feels the economy is overheating. It makes borrowing more expensive and saving better value, thus there is less investment in the economy.

In 1999, the US had had a prolonged boom and was well above trend. it was unsustainable. Throwing us back into economic growth would have postponed a worse recession later. Good politics (would have been in Bush's term) but bad economics. I think the economy was pretty fantastically handled through most of the '90s. Greenspan tried to curtail irrational exuberance by raising interest rates slightly, but not enough to throw off the millions of sensibly-spending homeowners who couldn't afford too much of a hike in their mortgage payments. He slowed the growth and lessoned the boom without derailing anything.

When the economy went surplus in 1998, we needed a tax cut effective for fiscal '99. It was the high tax payments in April, 2000 that triggered the stock market collapse. That collapse might have been less severe, and more of a correction had the tax payments that had to be made in April been less. The effect of a deficit, just at this moment, would have helped to keep up demand and would have also help postpone a recession when profits collapsed and furher contributed to the stock market sell off.

This is hindsight, of course. But an overheated economy signals itself in a sharp rise in taxes due to bonuses, stock options and stock price growth. These can reduce even large deficits to zero and into surplusses. These are economies on the brink, the economies that need an immediate tax cut.

We are there now, again, IMHO.

[Imran Siddiqui]

So the solution to an overheating economy is to cut taxes, resulting in further overheating?! That's bonkers Ned, and just the thing for a massive recession/correction. Seeing as how every expansion period has lead to greater tax revenues as more people get more money, your system eventually leaves the state with absolutely no taxes.