richKarlmarx wrote:
Originally Posted by Rexanglorum
I had learned enough economics to know how little I knew relative to how much knowledge exists, discovered and yet to be discovered.
Wowwww dude i just went thru the same thing about a week ago. the more I learn, the lower my academic esteem gets (figuratively). Im majoring in financial economics and econometrics, I never realized the sheer extent of how much is out there.
whered you go to school btw?
I went to CSU Northridge and the department was very Austrian. So if you are not humbled by simply learning all of the implied lesson in economics, thatpertain to dispersed knowledge, the professors will tell you explicitly how little one person or even one committee can know, in terms of a share of all of theknowledge that exists. With that simple but profound fact in your mind, it all but demolishes the foundations for economic central planning or socialengineering as viable ideas. It also makes the merits of the market place that much more understandable and allows one to see why it, despite all of flaws,outperforms all other systems, which always assume that a person or small group of people can know more than the collective knowledge of a millions of economicactors.
When people ask be what is the most important thing that I learned in economics, I tell them that the wealth or poverty of a nation is primarily determined byhow well its people are at coordinating activity between strangers. Natural resources are a tiny part of the picture, even the skills of the population and thecapital stock are secondary compared to how well society is at pulling together all of those mundane but pivots morsels of knowledge and then enticing those inthe society to act upon them in a manner that is most efficient.
You obviously had a more mathematical approach to economics, I did some econometrics but only a few classes of that and statistics in general, my focus was noton mathamtical modeling and statistical methods. In many cases, those who were trained in a more mathematical approach to economics can be guilty of slightlyover estimating how much data they can coordinate for the purposes of allocating resources and making predictions. However, you obviously have not fallen intothe mathamatical trap and are as aware of anyone of the constraints associated with someone trying to aggregate knwoledge on a scale that is normally done indecentralized manner.
