The U.S. Isn't As Economically Free As It Used to Be
online.wsj.com
online.wsj.com
"Policies recently enacted by Democrats are ruining the country, according to a set of rankings released today by a conservative think tank which believes Democrats will ruin the country and a conservative newspaper which believes Democrats will ruin the country."
If so, why not address those points rather than deploy ad hominems?
I expect it wouldn't be too hard to find a similar article from an "opposing position" with all the same muddled thinking and question begging, but what would that really accomplish? This sort of nonsense goes firmly in the "not even wrong" bin.
Stuff like this is more about social status-seeking and in-group identity than about the ostensible topic.
I don't see it as ad hominem. Talking about "economic freedom" is basically pointless unless one comes out and admits what definition of "economic freedom" is being used. The WSJ story notably doesn't do this, but it's not terribly hard to infer that the economic principles applied are likely informed by the strongly right-leaning political views of the institutions behind the study.
Or, putting it another way: the study attributes the "loss" of economic freedom largely to the response to the recent economic crisis. Which corresponds with a time when the political opponents of the sponsoring organizations had just cemented control of two out of three branches of the federal government. If the New York Times and other politically-left-leaning organizations published a study which claimed a drastic decline at the precise moment the Republican Party gained the same level of control, would you assume objectivity on their part?
Is it possible to quantify the level of regulations and rules made up by government?
2) In part, you can measure the amount of paperwork and time delay in achieving common tasks, like buying land, building a warehouse and incorporating. The sheer number of regulations may also be an indicator for the amount of friction the government is introducing. Defining "level of regulations and rules" is also important in order to come up with a good quantification scheme.
http://saffell.files.wordpress.com/2010/01/dist.jpg
Sorry it's not a histogram, but you get a sense of the distribution. The full data is at: http://saffell.wordpress.com/2010/01/21/distribution-of-2010...
(3 countries below 30 are not on chart)
Can someone explain to me how the recent government policies have lead to job losses. I have always thought the opposite was true.
Of course, there's also plenty of explanations about how government policies have created new jobs.
Measuring results and identifying causal relationships is incredibly difficult in economics, and with all the associated political issues at stake it's hard to cut through all the bullshit.
There is no control, there is only very broad "repeatability." We have only circumstances and the interpretation thereof.
In macroeconomics, at least.
Of course, that means lots of math, and lots of research, and lots of hard work, and having to actually to change your mind if your predictions are wrong, and--worst of all--it means not making simple, sound-bite pronouncements that fit someone's political agenda. You can't make a career writing editorials about how there's a 73% chance that raising taxes on widgets will reduce the annual productivity of the foobar industry by 1.3%.
No amount of math can tease apart the indiscernibly complex.
We observe correlations naturally. Assumed relationships. The sort which suggested God wanted us to dance to bring on rain. But without controls, and without repeatable experimentation, we can not have a true scientific method. The scientific method requires hypothesis, predictions, and repeatable experimentations. One successful dance is an anecdote, many is a theory, decades of them is a law, still questionable. But how can you repeat an experiment which takes place over a whole society of people, millions strong, with life constantly intervening?
This isn't only about soundbites, it's about having no means to achieve anything more definitive than soundbites.
If there's any structure at all, you can find it with enough math and enough data; that's exactly the purpose of statistics.
But without controls, and without repeatable experimentation, we can not have a true scientific method. The scientific method requires hypothesis, predictions, and repeatable experimentations.
No, this misunderstands science. All the scientific method requires is testable predictions. Predicting the outcome of a controlled experiment is merely a very efficient way to go about it. There are plenty of scientific fields where simple controlled experiments aren't really viable, and people get by. It's just more difficult, and requires more discipline from researchers.
Is there anyone who actually believes that the US has not lost economic freedom, when the mortgage and auto industries are under government control, with healthcare shortly to follow?
On the other hand, they have little corruption and low crime rates, so hey, if it works for them...
They attempt to get a broader view of freedom by including other indices.
Their tops, from 2006: Estonia, Ireland, Canada, Switzerland, Iceland, Bahamas, United Kingdom
And then, finally, United States
Singapore is ranked 49th, on account of being ranked 95th in the "individual freedom" category.
Without any of these, there can be no economic freedom.
Do you mean that economic freedom is meaningless without broader human rights?
This is an insightful analysis of HK and Singapore's so-called high degree of economic freedom: http://www.nytimes.com/2006/01/08/opinion/08iht-edbowring.ht...