The first 10 on today’s playlist:

By the way, the primary reason for the mathematicalization of economics is not to improve economics (it doesn’t), but rather to give economists and related who wish to hoodwink and swindle the public an excuse for dismissing lay critics.

Economics could drop 90% of its math and actually be more effective because it’d force it to concentrate on sociology, psychology and other methods of assessing actual human behavior.

Economics in reality is just the sociology of money. The field should reflect this.

Among economists, I’ve often seen this odd idea that “there is no such thing as a bubble.”

While I understand their arguments just fine, I think they are dangerously delusional and since their analysis is limited to economics only — and not sociology or psychology — they (as usual) miss the largest components of what defines, gives genesis to, and deflates a bubble environment.

(As an aside, an indictment of our university system is that it is both too broad and too narrow: too broad in the sense that there is never any unification of fields, just a bunch of disparate electives with no connective tissue, and too narrow in the sense that when a person specializes they focus on one tiny little area and believe by organizational imperatives that nothing else is or can be important. Hence, our modern economists who only can see economics, and a narrowly-defined spreadsheet-fuckery-focused physics-envying economics at that.)

Working backwards, that bubbles cause harm* proves that something unusual and undesirable was occurring. Does one really need other proof? Or is this just assumed to be the normal operations of capitalism?

If you accept the DSGE as some from of truth, then you must arrive at bizarre conclusions that countervail reality as Sumner does.

Nowhere are so many economists so clueless as they are about bubbles. It’s like reading writings from an alien.

Also, the argument that a bubble did not really exist because prices eventually recover — well, that’s about the level of argumentation of a second grader. In other words, all’s well that ends well is not really an argument for anything, it’s more an argumentum ad magicum

*And if you don’t believe the bubble of 2008 popping caused great harm, well, I got nothing for ya.

The blog I ran around 2003 was much more popular than this one. I made more effort to market it, and I got linked by several A-list bloggers frequently so I had thousands of hits a day and hundreds of commenters.

Only one notable (for lack of a better word) troll/stalker type. Think he hated my politics. He’d gone on some ranting tangent one time about reporting my blog to my boss to “get me fired” and that he knew where I worked and provided some evidence of that.

Since he seemed to leave a valid email address in his comments, I composed and sent a response to that email address, CCed my boss and said, “Hey [Boss], you going to fire me today for this appalling blog? Or should we just have lunch and laugh at the troll?”

My boss read my blog daily and had for several years. She replied that we’d have lunch and that she always enjoyed hunting trolls.

Never heard from that particular commenter again.