["The poverty of the view under attack can be summarized as follows. The demand it places on successful or acceptable theories - that they explain or reduce the facts as conceived within common sense (or within theories already 'established') - assigns to the framework of common sense a significance beyond what it deserves. That framework, after all, is just *the theory that got there first*, and this is hardly a sufficient reason to demand that all subsequent theories treat it as a touchstone for their own adequacy." Paul Churchland "Scientific Realism and the Plasticity of Mind]
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/07/05/magazine/the-economys-missing-metrics.html Throughout his career, Kuznets argued that military armaments should be heavily discounted in G.D.P. measures, because, by design, they destroy the world rather than build it up.ONTINUE READING THE MAIN STORYHe sounded, at times, like a starry-eyed hippie. And that is certainly how he was viewed by the bureaucrats who set up our national accounting systems during the 1940s. They didn’t know how to value a mother’s ability to raise her children or what price to put on a pristine river or a mountaintop. They built our statistics around numbers they could gather, like the scale of industrial output, or the number of hours that a sample of American workers had spent on the job. Kuznets won the intellectual war, but he lost the practical battle. I’m fairly sure most economists, today, would prefer economic statistics that capture more fundamental measures of well-being. Instead, the government measures the numbers it always has instead of the ones that matter most to us. [Snip]
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