"Ed Huntress" wrote in message
...
On Fri, 3 Oct 2014 08:29:57 -0400, "Jim Wilkins"
wrote:

"Martin Eastburn" wrote in message
...
On 10/2/2014 12:11 PM, Jim Wilkins wrote:
"Ed Huntress" wrote in message
...

...
National debt is one of the strangest aspects of the whole
thing.
There is no way to sort it out by common sense because common
sense
has proven to be wrong, time after time. Common sense is based
on
experience and we have little experience with the amounts of
debt
that
we're talking about here. It's like the old story about personal
debt:
If you owe the bank $10,000, you have a problem. If you owe the
bank
$10 million, the bank has a problem....
--
Ed Huntress

Do you agree with this?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Modern_Monetary_Theory

It seems a logical and well written explanation to me, though I
don't
know enough to find flaws in its speculations.

-jsw


hocus pocus is a lot of it - this is a massively changed document
that is in flux as I type.
(I'm an editor / corrector on one of wiki's pages. )
Look at the page and then see the TALK button on top - flip open
that page. Discussions that are still on-going beating it up and
trying to
get it changed. Eco college page. Then look at the view
history -
wow a lot of changes - and whoa - a lot by one ?? Back on the
main
page, there are a lot of good (quality unknown) end-notes.

Tricky - might be a page of a doctoral student who is taking
inputs
from professors, students, you, me, self proclaimed...

It is only one of many theories. See the bottom of the page -
hyperlinks.

Martin Eastburn

I do realize that Economics has no more solid theoretical basis than
Climatology and that both arrogantly demand the respect they envy in
the hard sciences, which their results do not justify.

The strength of economics is in its empirical studies, not in
theory.
As for the hard sciences: when physics figures out "dark energy" and
integrates general relativity with quantum mechanics, they, too,
will
actually have a sound theoretical basis. g

"Empirical studies" were the state of metallurgy when statistical
analysis showed that the urine of red-headed boys or fern-fed goats
were best for hardening steel. Smiths could sometimes make excellent
swords by following procedures but didn't understand why they worked.

Now we understand the effects alloying ingredients have on the rate of
recrystallization and can control hardness with cooling rate, or
design an alloy to have predicted properties. Successful extrapolation
is the ultimate confirmation of a theory, and the reason we still use
both Relativity and Quantum Mechanics although we know they disagree
at the extremes.

Your fringe counterexamples apply to places and scales we can't reach
to collect data. I realize we may not have the final answers, only
ones that adequately explain all experimental observations in
practical physics and engineering on planet Earth.

Climatology can't reconstruct the known past, I don't know that
Economics even dares to try. I silenced an Elliot Wave proponent by
challenging him to reconstruct the last 10 years with it. He couldn't
snow me with NASA signal processing theory that I understood better
than he did.

The deviation between mainstream climate models run backwards is
around three times larger than the warming from observed data.
Projected hurricane tracks are called "spaghetti models" because our
understanding of energy flow in the atmosphere is inadequate to
accurately predict two days into the future.
http://stormfacts.net/models.htm

The difference between a hard and a soft science is that a hard
science has a fundamental understanding of underlying cause and effect
and doesn't rely on statistics beyond correcting for random noise.

Biology is a good current example of how a field of science matures.
We know for example how DNA codes for proteins but not all its other
regulatory functions. It's maturing as we watch.

-jsw