Tag: Cafe Hayek

Why economics a dismal science

You try and you try but still can’t be sure.

However greatly our theories and techniques of investigation [using economic models and testing them through statistical trials] assist us to interpret the observed facts, they give little help in ascertaining all those particulars which enter into the determination of the complex patterns, and which we would have to know to achieve complete explanation, or precise predictions.

Which is where the free market comes in, millions  of buyers and sellers and their “complex patterns,” which no  man or woman or gang of eight or ten or a thousand can explain completely or predict precisely.

Bill O’Reilly gets millions for bombast, but . . .

. . . oil companies should not export?

You’re paid so handsomely [writes Donald J. Boudreaux, of Cafe Hayek and Geo. Mason U.] because there’s a large nation-wide demand for your commentary and bombast. In your career you’ve worked for broadcasters in Boston, Dallas, Denver, Hartford, and elsewhere. And before moving to Fox you were a correspondent for ABC News.

You apparently never hesitated to sell your product to the highest bidder; you never hesitated to export yourself from one market to another in search of higher pay; you never resisted the bidding for your services by buyers (i.e., employers) far and wide which put upward pressure on the amounts of money that you are paid, both to appear on television and to deliver lunch and dinnertime speeches.

As the nation’s best-known populist, can we expect less?