The rationale for counting armaments, as Paul Samuelson pointed out 65 years ago, is that it gives an indicator of productive potential *if armaments weren't being produced*. This is like counting spiders as butterflies because they indicate how many butterflies there would be if the spiders were all butterflies. An old joke that Abe Lincoln is said to have repeated asked, "how many legs would a cow have if you called a tail a leg?" The answer is four. Calling a tail a leg doesn't make it one.
On Sun, Jul 5, 2015 at 2:04 PM, Ian Murray <[email protected]> wrote: > ["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 > <http://www.nytimes.com/2015/07/05/magazine/the-economys-missing-metrics.html?ref=business> > > > > 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 STORY > <http://www.nytimes.com/2015/07/05/magazine/the-economys-missing-metrics.html?ref=business#story-continues-6> > > He 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] > > _______________________________________________ > pen-l mailing list > [email protected] > https://lists.csuchico.edu/mailman/listinfo/pen-l > > -- Cheers, Tom Walker (Sandwichman)
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