• Skip to primary navigation
  • Skip to main content
  • Skip to primary sidebar

Chris Leithner

  • About Chris
  • Archive
  • Links
  • Books – Australia
  • Books – Canada
  • Books – USA
  • Show Search
Hide Search

Leithner Letter Nos. 215-221

Chris · September 26, 2017 ·

26 September 2017 – 26 March 2018

Alan Jay Levinovitz recently put forth the provocative argument that economics is The New Astrology. …

The failure of the field to predict the 2008 crisis has also been well-documented. In 2003, for example, only five years before the Great Recession, the Nobel Laureate Robert E. Lucas Jr told the American Economic Association that “macroeconomics …  has succeeded: its central problem of depression prevention has been solved.” Short-term predictions fair little better — in April 2014, for instance, a survey of 67 economists yielded 100 per cent consensus: interest rates would rise over the next six months. Instead, they fell. A lot.

… It appears that Levinovitz hasn’t quite grasped the full consequences of the argument he has espoused; namely that because economics models are mostly useless and cannot predict the future with any sort of certainty, then centrally directing an economy would be effectively like flying blind. The failure of economic models to pan out is simply more proof of the pretense of knowledge. And it’s not more knowledge that we need, it’s more humility. The humility to know that “wise” bureaucrats are not the best at directing a market — market participants themselves are.

Andrew Syrios
Economists Are the New Astrologers
Mises Wire (28 August 2017)

My longtime friend and colleague Dr Thomas Sowell says, “It takes considerable knowledge just to realize the extent of your own ignorance.” Nobel laureate Friedrich August von Hayek admonished, “The curious task of economics is to demonstrate to men how little they really know about what they imagine they can design.” The fact that we have gross ignorance about how the world operates is ignored by the know-it-all elites who seek to control our lives. …

Think about this morning’s breakfast. Let’s suppose you and your spouse each had four slices of bacon and two eggs. You had coffee, and your spouse had cocoa. The breakfast might have cost you $22. But what might it have cost you if instead of being dependent upon others, you … produced your own breakfast? … One thing that’s guaranteed is that your breakfast would be far costlier than in the case where you depended upon the benefits of skills of others that emerge from the division of labour and trade.

The bottom line is that each of us is grossly ignorant about the world in which we live. Nothing’s wrong with that ignorance, but we are stupid if we believe that a politician can produce a better life than that which is obtained through peaceable, voluntary exchange with our fellow man anywhere on earth.

Walter E. Williams
Ignorance versus Stupidity (9 November 9 2017)

Universities are encountering “a tide of community and political hostility,” according to the chief executive of the Group of Eight, representing leading Australian universities. Vicki Thomson told a conference in Shanghai on Tuesday that “the more available to the community a university education in Australia has become, the less the community has trusted us.”

… Ms Thomson noted that universities in other Western countries faced the same problem, with British Environment Minister Michael Gove saying “people in the country have had enough of experts.” In the U.S., she said, the Pew Research Centre found that 58% of Republicans and Republican-leaning independents believed colleges and universities had a negative effect on the country.

Unis Face “Tide of Hostility” and Loss of Trust
The Australian (8 November 2017)

The Bourgeois Manifesto

What ails the U.S.? According to Amy Wax and Larry Alexander (Paying the Price for Breakdown of the Country’s Bourgeois Culture, The Philadelphia Inquirer, 9 August 2017),

Too few Americans are qualified for the jobs available. Male working-age labour-force participation is at Depression-era lows. Opioid abuse is widespread. Homicidal violence plagues inner cities. Almost half of all children are born out of wedlock, and even more are raised by single mothers. Many college students lack basic skills, and high school students rank below those from two dozen other countries.

They might have added that almost 80% of American workers subsist from one paycheque to the next, the U.S. Government has long been broke and it’s now in worse fiscal shape than any developed nation (see also this). As in matters economic and military, so too in social disorders: the U.S. is the Western world’s leader – and to various extents Australia, Britain, Canada, etc., are compliant followers. What underlies these plagues? Wax and Alexander reckon that

The causes of these phenomena are multiple and complex, but implicated in these and other maladies is the breakdown of … bourgeois culture. That culture laid out the script we all were supposed to follow: Get married before you have children and strive to stay married for their sake. Get the education you need for gainful employment, work hard, and avoid idleness. Go the extra mile for your employer or client. … Be neighbourly, civic-minded, and charitable. Avoid coarse language in public. … Eschew substance abuse and crime.

To read the full Newsletter (PDF), click here.

Filed Under: Uncategorized

Primary Sidebar

Subscribe to the Leithner Letter

* indicates required

About this website

About this website

This site hosts newsletters, books, etc., written initially for shareholders of Leithner & Company Pty Ltd and subsequently for anybody who wants to read them. … [Read More] about About this website

Recent Posts

  • The Risk of Higher Rates the RBA’s Overlooking March 20, 2023
  • Why Australia won’t become a “renewable energy export superpower” March 6, 2023
  • Farewell low “inflation” and interest rates? February 20, 2023
  • “Global Energy Transition” – Fact or Fiction? February 6, 2023
  • Will 2023 be beautiful or ugly? January 23, 2023

Archives

  • March 2023
  • February 2023
  • January 2023
  • December 2022
  • November 2022
  • October 2022
  • September 2022
  • August 2022
  • July 2022
  • June 2022
  • May 2022
  • April 2022
  • March 2022
  • February 2022
  • January 2022
  • December 2021
  • November 2021
  • October 2021
  • September 2021
  • July 2021
  • June 2021
  • May 2021
  • April 2021
  • March 2021
  • February 2021
  • January 2021
  • December 2020
  • November 2020
  • October 2020
  • September 2020
  • June 2020
  • March 2020
  • November 2019
  • July 2019
  • March 2019
  • November 2018
  • August 2018
  • April 2018
  • September 2017
  • July 2017
  • March 2017
  • November 2016
  • July 2016
  • March 2016
  • November 2015
  • July 2015
  • March 2015
  • October 2014
  • June 2014
  • February 2014
  • October 2013
  • July 2013
  • February 2013
  • November 2012
  • July 2012
  • April 2012
  • December 2011
  • August 2011
  • April 2011
  • November 2010
  • July 2010
  • April 2010
  • December 2009
  • September 2009
  • June 2009
  • March 2009
  • December 2008

Copyright © 2023 · Chris Leithner