Hacker News Reader

Comment by Barrin92 | Hacker News Reader

There's not actually a lot of argumentation on that page concerning the disadvantages of central bank currencies other than fairly generic criticisms like

>"the compelling of economic agents (businesses and individuals) to consume particular goods and services preferred by policy makers;"

which as far as I can tell is already the case anyway through countless of policy tools, same goes for arguments about "cyber hacking" or regulation. It's also not actually a risk from an objective standpoint because that is very much an explicit goal of such a currency.

Also I'm not exactly sure how seriously I'm supposed to take someone who advertises himself as a 'professional economist', but as far as I can tell does not actually work as an economist, has a bachelors degree and no publication history and tries to sell me gold and silver from his dealership on the same page he writes this piece about central bank currency.

View on HN

>Also I'm not exactly sure how seriously I'm supposed to take someone who advertises himself as a 'professional economist', but as far as I can tell does not actually work as an economist, has a bachelors degree and no publication history and tries to sell me gold and silver from his dealership on the same page he writes this piece about central bank currency.

Presumably an economist who runs a profitable business has demonstrated more economic understanding than the average academic economist, as academic economists don't face any feedback loop that penalises them for bad predictions. As Karl Popper said, a science is only a science when it makes falsifiable predictions that are proven correct.

>Presumably an economist who runs a profitable business has demonstrated more economic understanding than the average academic economist

No, he hasn't demonstrated any understanding of economics the same way a bird doesn't demonstrate understanding of physics just because it can fly. I think you've misunderstood Karl Popper if you took away from his work that selling gold on the internet makes you an economist or a scientist.

Someone could make ten million dollars running an MLM scheme but last time I checked that does not turn you into an authority on macroeconomics.

When I have studied economics, our professor went into long lengths in explanation what makes one an economist.

And the main thing is. To be economist, you have to act in discourse of economics. And discourse of economics is defined by economs.

You don't need any particular profession or education to be economist, just participation in the discourse makes you one. When you are paid to participate, you are professional.

A question is, whether you must participate in research. If yes, you could say that for example economics teacher is not an economist even when they have studied it, they understand it and they teach it. And you could ask the same for 'company economists', CFOs, accountants. They have studied it, they understand it and their main discourse's within of what economists study.

One more thing is. I have met lots of economics grads who had almost no understanding of economics. They learned for tests, then they forgot. A few years after graduation, they remember maybe 5-10%. And I have met lots of amateurs who study, read, think and discuss actively. They might not have a degree and their understanding of economics is superior to a huge percentage of econ grads.

There is a snag, one that Popper didn't understand either, but which makes this all the clearer: predictions are never proven correct in science. They are shown to be "not false within the bounds of statistical and measurement error". So one guy doing well at least shows he is "not wrong", but within arbitrarily large error margins, because he is just one guy and it might all be just a coincidence. Only if you repeat the experiment a sufficient number of times you will arrive at error margins that are not laughably huge.

So the feedback loop doesn't mean anything really, beyond weeding out huge mistakes (huge as in: same magnitude as the error bars). Because it is always just one guy, no numbers, no statistics.

To get back to Popper: Newton's gravity wasn't really proven wrong, it just had its error bars known and explained. Einstein's general relativity is more precise, therefore less wrong and can explain Newtons error bars. But Newton's gravity is still right enough for almost all purposes. So it isn't falsified in Popper's sense, it is refined.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com