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Bad analogy. There is a plausible mechanism by which consumer sentiment—and, thus, the economy as a whole—can be influenced by media reports. There is no simila

• ajross 8y ago
  Bad logic. The presence of a plausible hypothesis doesn't prove causality! This mistake is like 80% of bad science. How many times are we going to repeat it? The counterfactual I provided is just an obvious example of the fallacy. The real meat of the argument was in that post too -- it's far more likely (Occam and all) that people are predicting recessions because every dummy can see that a recession is likely following the end of an expansion than that there is some kind of magical effect on public thinking. This is just politics. You don't want your favored entity to get blamed for a recession, so you find a way to make that recession the "fault" of your political enemies. But no, growth cycles are cycles for a reason, and we don't need "fault" to describe what happens.
  • toasterlovin 8y ago
    I was commenting strictly on your analogy. I agree that correlation does not equal causation.
    • pessimizer 8y ago
      The entire point of the analogy is that it is well known that sentiment does not affect the weather.
• pessimizer 8y ago
  It's not a bad analogy, it's an alternate explanation of how you could see the same effect without any causal relationship between recession sentiment and actual recession. Another example are quack cures: unusual cures are tried when people are at their sickest, then people improve, and they credit the improvement to the cure. Almost everybody who is very sick gets better, though, and the rest are too dead to denounce the cure as fake.