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You are looking at a car driving on a hilly road. The car's engine is not powerful enough. You observe that on the uphills, the driver is flooring the gas pedal
by dav-ycombinator 11y ago
You are looking at a car driving on a hilly road.
The car's engine is not powerful enough.
You observe that on the uphills, the driver is flooring the gas pedal and yet the speed of the car is decreasing.
Confusing correlation and causation leads to the faulty conclusion => the gas pedal must really be the brake pedal
Enabling (arbitrarily) negative rates is equivalent to lifting the power limit on the engine and would simply allow the driver to keep the car at constant speed on all hills (the brakes already have unlimited power)
- toyg 11y agoExcept this driver has a stake in petrol companies and he does not pay for his petrol, so he gets richer the more fuel is blown while standing still. By the time you've taken out any "power limit", he's just blocked the gearbox on neutral and revving, while shouting "it's not going anywhere! I need more power!" The economy is not physics - it's psychology.
- dav-ycombinator 11y agoOk. With that kind of argument, I suppose anything can make sense.
- collyw 11y agoCome one, its not worse than anything that professional economists come up with. They can't even agree on things amongst themselves.
- dav-ycombinator 11y agoEconomists agree much more often than not. But that doesn't seem to matter, even when nearly 100% of economists agree on something, the public think it knows better... http://www.economist.com/news/finance-and-economics/21569378-if-economists-agree-something-public-will-almost-certainly-think http://www.economist.com/news/finance-and-economics/21569378...