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Of course, the exact opposite dynamic also exists in full bloom - when did you last see an advocate for government action invite falsification? Mariana Mazzuca

Of course, the exact opposite dynamic also exists in full bloom - when did you last see an advocate for government action invite falsification? Mariana Mazzucato's work on The Entrepreneurial State makes frequent appearances in these parts, typically in the shape of references to internet startups not really being innovative, because the internet/GPS/touch screens/Siri have roots in government research programs.

dragonwriter 11y ago
> when did you last see an advocate for government action invite falsification? All the time: very often advocates of government action tend to predict an association between specific government actions and specific results, rather than ascribing bad results to "government" generally and good results to "the market", drawing both bad and good results from scenarios where government regulation shapes the market; while anti-government advocates like to pretend that there is a symmetry between their non-specific advocacy against government and some opposing advocacy for government, that's not actually the case.
- AnimalMuppet 11y ago
  Well, all right, but how often do you see the loop closed? "We predicted results X from this government program (with these error bars), actual results were Y, which were/were not withing the error bars." I have literally never seen that kind of analysis of a government program, still less a group of them. But it's essential, so that we can tell whether the predictions of what the next program will do have any basis in reality.
  - chipotle_coyote 11y ago
    While this isn't necessarily the exact kind of analysis you're talking about, it's very close to what the Government Accountability Office was set up to report on -- and from what I can tell, they do their job pretty well. We don't hear about them very often in large part because what they do isn't very "sexy," politics-wise.

dragonwriter 11y ago

> when did you last see an advocate for government action invite falsification? All the time: very often advocates of government action tend to predict an association between specific government actions and specific results, rather than ascribing bad results to "government" generally and good results to "the market", drawing both bad and good results from scenarios where government regulation shapes the market; while anti-government advocates like to pretend that there is a symmetry between their non-specific advocacy against government and some opposing advocacy for government, that's not actually the case.

AnimalMuppet 11y ago
Well, all right, but how often do you see the loop closed? "We predicted results X from this government program (with these error bars), actual results were Y, which were/were not withing the error bars." I have literally never seen that kind of analysis of a government program, still less a group of them. But it's essential, so that we can tell whether the predictions of what the next program will do have any basis in reality.
- chipotle_coyote 11y ago
  While this isn't necessarily the exact kind of analysis you're talking about, it's very close to what the Government Accountability Office was set up to report on -- and from what I can tell, they do their job pretty well. We don't hear about them very often in large part because what they do isn't very "sexy," politics-wise.