Back in 1992, New Jersey raised the minimum wage by 18 per cent while its neighbour state, Pennsylvania, left its minimum wage unchanged. Unemployment in New Jersey should — according to mainstream economic theory — have increased relative to Pennsylvania. However, when economists Alan Krueger and David Card gathered information on fast food restaurants in the two states, it turned out that unemployment had actually decreased in New Jersey relative to that in Pennsylvania. Counter to neoclassical demand theory we had an anomalous case of a backward-sloping supply curve.
Lo and behold!
But of course — when facts and theory don’t agree, it’s the facts that have to be wrong …Read the rest where James Buchanan makes a fool of himself without being savvy enough to realize that, "It's the ideology, stupid."
I'm not sure that gobbledygook is the correct term here though. I'd suggest Buchanan's own term, camp-following whoring.
"When the facts change, I change my mind. What do you do, sir?" — attributed to J. M. Keynes.
Ideologues double down.
Lars P. Syll’s Blog
Demand theory gobbledygookLars P. Syll | Professor, Malmo University
Lars P. Syll’s Blog
Demand theory gobbledygookLars P. Syll | Professor, Malmo University
2 comments:
"Such a claim, if seriously advanced, becomes equivalent to a denial that there is even minimal scientific content in economics, and that, in consequence, economists can do nothing but write as advocates for ideological interests. Fortunately, only a handful of economists are willing to throw over the teaching of two centuries; we have not yet become a bevy of camp-following whores." -James Buchanan
BWAHAHAHAHAAHAAAAAAHHAHAHA!!!
Talk about convicting yourself.
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