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14 sats \ 0 replies \ @SimpleStacker 11 Jan \ on: Any of you heard of Gary's economics and is he a socialist? econ
Eh, I don't know him and I don't have time to watch his videos. But I can tell you what I would look for before I would call them a "good" economist:
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Is this person a systematic thinker who is able to "zoom out"? Sometimes people have a decent analysis of one particular thing in isolation, but they fail to consider the knock on and spillover effects into other areas.
- Example: emissions of electric vehicles. Many people fail to even think about the emissions cost of mining, production, and disposal and only look at the emissions that come from directly operating the car.
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Is the person overly ideological? Having opinions is fine, but if the person seems to cherry-pick data and ignore any evidences that go against their point of view, then they're not worth listening to.
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Does the person understand data? Too many people take research papers and claims by "experts" at face value. I only want to listen to someone who has demonstrated an ability to be critical about data and research claims. They need to understand endogeneity: reverse causality, omitted variables bias, measurement error, selection bias. They also need to be aware that data collection itself is imperfect. Someone who takes every statistic and every research report at face value isn't worth listening to.
- Example: crime statistics. If crime goes down, it can be due to crime actually going down, or less reporting, or less discovery, or recategorization of crimes.
- Another example: COVID statistics. If hospitals get extra money for COVID patients, they have an incentive to mark more patients as having COVID. Too many people failed or refused to acknowledge this when discussing COVID stats.