...is passed out by Thomas DiLorenzo to A. W. Phillips, posthumously, who invented an analog computer that supposedly modeled economic theory with water flows. DiLorenzo
writes of the former London School of Economics professor:
The Economics Profession’s Dr. Frankenstein
That would be A. W. Phillips of Keynesian “Phillips Curve” notoriety and also of the Dr. Frankensteinish MONIAC computer that purportedly imitated the real economy. It’s absolutely hilarious to think that such an idiotic gadget with water pumped in to represent taxes, and pumped out to represent savings, was so celebrated by the likes of Nobel laureate economists Paul Samuelson and Robert Solow in the ’50s and ’60s
Anyone wanna lay bets on if the Fed uses chicken bones and dice for consultation on monetary policy, converting their findings to graphs and pie chart after?
ReplyDeleteSouth Park already scooped you on this: they use headless chickens. The video evidence titled "south park federal reserve policy" is all over the internet. For example, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wz-PtEJEaqY
DeleteHa! Great, I had never seen it before. Thanks!
DeleteLMAO!
DeleteI didn't realize the inventor of that goofy machine and the curve were the same person.
ReplyDeletethe old country's central bank smilingly memorializes him http://www.rbnz.govt.nz/research_and_publications/reserve_bank_bulletin/2007/2007dec70_4ngwright.pdf
I note on pg 52 of that publication "The Bank’s current model, the Forecasting and Policy
System (FPS), has been in active use for policy analysis and
forecasting since 1997. The broad economic relationships
represented in FPS bear a perhaps striking similarity to
those in the MONIAC". (FFS, Grand Uncle Ludwig would have a fit)
but fortunately if you asked anybody in New Zealand who he was, nobody would have a clue.
New Zealand made a shift during the late 70s/early 80s from straight keynesianism to Chicago school economics but is still as rule bound as ever. (one other thing the infernal machine are has always leaked and has to be restored periodically, at great expense of the taxpayer which kind of sums it up)
MONIAC, so close to MANIAC, which would have been far more fitting for Phillips.
ReplyDeleteMore distortions from the Abe Lincoln hater. After a tax increase, the water was pumped into a container that represented the treasury, not the entire economy. He's making it sound as if the machine treated the public sector as the entire economy. The water was pumped from the private sector into the treasury. Savings pumped water from the consumption side of the private sector into banks. Money flowed out from the treasury into different areas of govt spending. Money flowed out of the banks into different types of investments. MONIAC had been designed to be used as a teaching aid but was discovered also to be an effective economic simulator.
ReplyDelete"Water could be pumped back to the treasury from some of the tanks to represent taxation."
Yes, because humans are inantimate water molecules and the economy is an algorithm where wealth flows around based on opening and closing valves. It's all so simple (or simple-minded).
DeleteOne crackpot endorses another.
DeleteTo be precise, a MMT crackpot endorses a Keynesian crackpot.
DeleteMONIAC had been designed to be used as a teaching aid but was discovered also to be an effective economic simulator."
DeleteNice rip off word-for-word directly from Wikipedia where it has been flagged as being included without citation:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MONIAC_Computer
So you've exposed yourself as a fraud with no original source knowledge. Why in the name of hell hasn't EPJ stopped approving your nonsense?
Re: Jerry Wolfgang,
Delete-- After a tax increase, the water was pumped into a container that represented the treasury, not the entire economy. --
Actually the machine was supposed to represent several aspects of the national economy of Great Britain and not just the Treasury. So you're incorrect on that account. Besides this, DiLorenzo never says that the machine was built to represent the *entire* economy, only that it purported to represent "the real economy" which it was.
Sadly enough, there is a huge percentage of human beings who cannot function in the real world. These are those who must believe that the tribal shamans with their bones and feathers and magic whistles and mathematical charts can "control" what is essentially a set of complex emergent phenomena, and keep the evil spirits who "eat up our prosperity" at bay. Sorry, Jerry, it just doesn't work that way, whether the frightened little corner of your lizard brain can accept that or not. You cannot control the economy in a manner similar to pumping water from tank to tank in a model any more than you can make the rains come and the crops grow by sacrificing chickens.
DeleteThe economy is not a linearly deterministic machine that you can control to effect "THE common good." The truth is that there is no one "common good;" there are billions of ideas, opinions, and perceptions of the common and the individual good -- and you cannot even know those, let alone control them. You don't have the information and you cannot get it. Aggregation is meaningless in many of the contexts where it is abused by economists to build comforting delusions about what they can create and control. It just doesn't work that way.
JW: Troll.
DeleteYoure right jerry it all functions so perfectly. Tom should resurrect the moniac and filll it with 14 tril and see what happens. it would be a YouTube classic. Swamp might rise
ReplyDeleteI saw something similar inhabiting the halls of the econ department at Berkeley back in the 1970s.
ReplyDeleteJW = Libertarian false flag in order to make Keynesians look even more stupid
ReplyDelete