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cynicalkane: "He's not criticizing people for not having heard of the name"

Nick Rowe: "Google seems to tell me I'm right. I'm the first link, which is really pathetic for such an important idea."

Not to mention that googling for "Fed Thermostat" brings up a lot of references. Friedman's is in the top page, Nick's is not:

https://www.google.com/search?q=fed+thermostat



Well, people being unaware of the name doesn't seem to have anything to do with the rest of his thesis. So if you're correct that would be rather incongruous with the rest of the post, which I think is valuable and worth reading.

So I don't think he's criticizing people for not knowing the specific name, but there's some egotism at play. He likes the idea he identified and the name he came up with, and is scratching his head that only market monetarists have picked up the name and that his blog--minor in the blogosphere--is still the first link.

Full quote:

Google seems to tell me I'm right. I'm the first link, which is really pathetic for such an important idea; the second is Friedman himself (pdf); and most of the rest on the first page are other bloggers, mostly Market Monetarists. But this idea has got nothing (in particular) to do with Monetarism.

But arguing about the interpretation of this sentence ultimately is a red herring--you don't go into rage-mode about a blog post because most of it says X but one sentence seems to say Y instead, especially if you can't be sure it even says Y.


The main thrust of his post is "look at this idea that no economists seem to be aware of". He makes his point by googling for this term that he made up.

He does not appear to be an Econometrician, nor a Statistician (I can't find his CV, which is odd), so the most likely answer is that he is wrong, and that this is a well understood phenomenon for which he doesn't know the proper technical term (viz., Multicollinearity).

This quote from his blog post sums it up for me (emphasis mine):

"And it really bugs me that people who know a lot more econometrics than I do think that you can get around the problem this way, when you can't"

[edit] - @cynicalkane - we are in violent agreement on the core theory, but equally violent disagreement on the extent to which his link-baity title & appropriation of Friedman's name is academically disingenuous.

Shall we call it a day?


That's a strange thing to complain about, because it's accepted that outsider criticism of econometrics is valid, including among econometricians. It's common to question the assumptions even if you don't understand the machinery. There's been a lot of it in particular about market modeling in the face of the subprime mortgage collapse, both from economists and non-economists.

I'm also not sure why you keep blasting him for not using the word "multicollinearity", when he's talking about a fairly specific kind of hidden variable anyway, and one that you simply can't pluck out of small macro data sets ex nihilo especially in the face of the Lucas critique.

For instance, in this blog post, http://ipeatunc.blogspot.com/2012/08/its-not-just-data-its-a... , a blogger discusses Milton Friedman's thermostat and then, in the comments, discusses deliberately leaving technical terms such as multicollinearity out of the post.


"Are you aware of this idea? Maybe under some other name??"

First paragraph of blog article.




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