“I’m out of that business because we all failed at that business. Right? All the early national experts. Here’s my projection model. Here’s my projection model. They were all wrong. They were all wrong.”
That’s New York State Governor Cuomo speaking on Memorial Day. Welcome to the club. I’ve been watching models fail for 50 years.
Cuomo has a right to be bitter. The models told him he’d need 30,000 respirators, but Trump only gave him 4,000 prompting him to ask Trump to pick the 26,000 people he wanted to die. Later he shipped his excess ventilators to other states. The faith he showed in the models he was fed would put a medieval theologian to shame.
Hopefully, in the future, those in power will be more cynical about the models presented to them.
So here’s a ‘greatest hits list’ of a few models which failed. Let’s start with
l. The population bomb (Paul Ehrlich) — ”
The battle to feed all of humanity is over. In the 1970s hundreds of millions of people will starve to death in spite of any crash programs embarked upon now. At this late date nothing can prevent a substantial increase in the world death rate.
2. The Club of Rome released the following broadside in 1974, “The Limits to Growth”Here is a direct quote from the jacket flap.
“Will this be the world that your grandchildren with thank you for? A world where industrial production has sunk to zero. Where population has suffered a catastrophic decline. Where the air, sea and land are polluted beyond redemption. Where civilization is a distant memory. This is the world that the computer forecasts. What is even more alarming, the collapse will not come gradually, but with awesome suddenness, with no way of stopping it”
You can read more about these two in the following post — https://luysii.wordpress.com/2018/04/11/an-unhappy-anniversary/
3. My cousin runs an advisory service for institutional investors (hedge funds, retirement funds, stock market funds etc. etc.) Here is the beginning of his latest post 16 June ’17
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| There were 3 great reads yesterday. First was Neil Irwin’s article in the NY Times “Janet Yellen, the Fed and the Case of the Missing Inflation.” He points out that Yellen is a labor market scholar who anticipated the sharp decline in the unemployment rate. However the models on which the Fed has relied anticipate higher levels of inflation. Yet every inflation measure that the Fed uses has fallen well short of the Fed’s 2% stability rate. If they continue raising short-term rates in the face of low inflation, then “real” rates could restrain future economic growth.Second was Greg Ip’s article “Lousy Raise? It Might Not Get Better.” Greg makes the point that tight labor markets are a global phenomenon in many industrialized countries, yet wage inflation remains muted. Writes Greg “If a labor market this tight can’t generate better pay, quite possibly it never will in Germany & Japan.”
Third was an article by Glenn Hubbard (Dean of Columbia Business School & former chairman of the Council of Economic Advisors under George W. Bush). His Wall Street Journal op-ed was titled “How to Keep the Fed from Following its Models off a Cliff.” Hubbard suggests that Fed officials should interact more with market participants and business people. And Fed governors should be selected because of their varied life experiences, and they should encourage a healthy skepticism of prevailing economic models. |
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Serious money was spent developing these models. Do you think that climate is in some way simpler than the US economy, so that they are more likely to be accurate? I do not.
4. Americans are getting fatter yet living longer, contradicting the model that being mildly overweight is bad for you. It is far too long to go into so here’s the link — https://luysii.wordpress.com/2013/05/30/something-is-wrong-with-the-model-take-2/.
The first part is particularly fascinating, in that data showed that overweight (not obese) people tended to live longer. The article describes how people who had spent their research careers telling the public that being overweight was bad, tried to discount the data. The best quote in the article is the following ““We’re scientists. We pay attention to data, we don’t try to un-explain them.”,
4. The economic predictions of the Congressional Budget Office on just about anything –inflation, gross national product, economic growth, the deficit — are consistently wrong — http://www.ncpa.org/sub/dpd/?Article_ID=21516.
Addendum 28 June “White house economists overestimated annual economic growth by about 80 percent on average for a six year stretch during Barack Obama’s presidency, according to Freedom Works economic consultant Stephen Moore.
Economists predicted growth between 3.2 to 4.6 percent for the years 2010 through 2015. Actual economic growth never hit above 2.6 percent.”
5. Animal models of stroke: There were at least 60, in which some therapy or other was of benefit. None of them worked in people. It got so bad I stopped reading the literature about it. We still have no useful treatment for garden variety strokes
6: Live by the model, die by the model. A fascinating book “Shattered” about the Hillary Clinton campaign, explains why the campaign did no polling in the final 3 weeks of the campaign. The man running the ‘data analytics’ (translation: model) Robby Mook, thought the analytics were better and more accurate (p. 367).
I might add that I have no special mistrust of climate models, I just mistrust all models of complex systems. For some thoughts on climate models please see — https://luysii.wordpress.com/2015/12/13/a-climate-treaty-based-on-a-failed-model-a-victory-for-the-political-class/
loupgarous On April 18, 2020 at 12:32 am
As you look straight ahead, light falls on the part of your retina with the highest spatial resolution (the macula). The blind spot due to the optic nerve is found closer to your nose, which means that in the right eye, the retina surrounding the blind spot ‘sees’ light coming from toward your ear. Light from the same direction ( your right ear) will NOT fall on the optic nerve of your left eye (which is toward your nose) so information from that area gets back to the brain (which is why you don’t see your blind spot).
Now visual space (say looking toward the right) is sent back to the brain coherently, so that areas of visual space transmitted by either eye go to the same place in the brain.
So if you now cover your left eye, there is an area of the brain (corresponding to the blind spot of the right eye) which is getting no information from the retina at all. So it is effectively blind. Technology permits us to actively stimulate the retina anywhere we want.. We also have ways to measure activity of the brain in any small area (functional MRI). Activity increases with visual input.
Now with the left eye patched, stimulate with light directed at the right eye’s blind spot. Nothing happens (no increase in activity) in the cortical area representing that part of the visual field. It isn’t getting any input. So it is possible to accurately map the representation of the right eye’s blind spot in the brain in terms of the brain areas responding to it.
Next visually stimulate the right eye with light hitting the retina adjacent to the right eye’s blind spot. Initially the blind spot area of the brain shows no activity, After just a few minutes, the area of the brain for the right eye’s blind spot begins to respond to stimuli it never responded to initially. This implies that those two areas of the brain have connections between them, that were always there, as new nerve processes just don’t grow that fast.
To be clever enough to think of a way to show this is truly brilliant. Bravo to the authors.