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I've seen this domain submitted in the last year or so. Who or what is Lynalden? Are they an economist, or a blogger, or both? Not that credentials are the be
by Wonnk13 5y ago
I've seen this domain submitted in the last year or so. Who or what is Lynalden? Are they an economist, or a blogger, or both?
Not that credentials are the be all end all, but what's different about this person vs anyone who's posting at SeekingAlpha, or any of the investing sub reddits?
- lottin 5y agoShe's not an economist. She's an engineer who taught herself economics. You can tell because she gets a lot of things wrong.
- steelstraw 5y agoAs an engineer, she's more bound by reality and reasons from first principles. I find that she's right more often than mainstream economists. Relevant example: They were surprised by non-transitory inflation, she was not. That's a huge miss by other economists.
- dragonwriter 5y ago> As an engineer, she's more bound by reality and reasons from first principles. Reasoning from first principles (applying a priori dogma) and being bound by reality (responding to empirical cues) are generally opposed, the exception is when the dogmas are laid down by people who are bound by reality. Much (but not all) engineering work is bounded by reality inherently because there is quick and non-murky feedback when it is wrong; this is a feature of the work, not the worker. Engineers working in economics (and even moreso in economic punditry than actual policy, though it's true either way) don't get that. And the available “first principle” dogmas they can choose to apply are either intentional pedagogical simplifications, poorly tested against reality by comparison to anything in most domains of engineering, or flatly falsified, often ideologically motivated, ideas.
- selimthegrim 5y agoThere's a difference between an engineer and a scientist, and you just hit on it.
- carlineng 5y ago> You can tell because she gets a lot of things wrong. That puts her in good company with pretty much all of the world's most respected economists.
- skybrian 5y agoMost people can’t tell. If you see something that’s wrong, it might be helpful to point it out.
- lottin 5y agoI agree, however her posts tend to be very long and if you starting pointing out all the mistakes that you find it can become tedious very quickly.
- hamiltonians 5y agohow about 2 things she gets wrong
- lottin 5y ago1. Comparing the money supply per capita (a meaningless statistic) to the CPI 2. Comparing the price of oil to the CPI for mysterious reasons 3. Making up the "natural resource cycle", a novel concept 4. Strange remarks that suggest she doesn't understand the subject matter: "with the caveat being that the new assets they created are subject to credit risk so they should create this new money prudently" (banks don't create money on purpose, new money is created as a side effect when they make loans) 5. Saying that the other way of creating money is by "monetizing large fiscal deficits" I'll stop here.
- pepy 5y agoranks top 15% of public stock pickers
- lottin 5y agoEconomists don't pick stocks.
- baq 5y agoIs there a law that forbids them to? An economist placing bets on the market puts money where their mouth is, so should just write whatever they think is true.
- lottin 5y agoNo, nothing forbids them from picking stocks. The skills related to picking stocks are completely unrelated to the economics profession.
- robjan 5y agoIt's easy to pick stocks in a bull market
- pepy 5y agoThen why aren't the other 85% not as nearly as good? They are in the same bull market. You're mixing relative and absolute performance. She puts the money where her mouth is and outperforms the average professional by a considerable margin. Gotta respect that.
- AutumnCurtain 5y agoShe's very popular with the bitcoin crowd, tends to write respectable-looking articles legitimizing them. She's also quite a skilled self promoter. I assume that's why she gets so much attention, because her blog posts are usually pretty banal, basic stuff in my experience. Not the worst, but not particularly worthy of attention or praise, IMO.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- wallacoloo 5y agowhat are more interesting blogs you’d recommend that touch similar-ish topics to Lyn’s?
- ctchocula 5y agoNot GP, but two blogs I like are https://noahpinion.substack.com https://noahpinion.substack.com and https://braddelong.substack.com https://braddelong.substack.com Both authors are quite witty, so their blogs are eminently readable. They're also trained in economics (have PhDs in economics) and are econ professors, so I put a lot more stock in the stuff they write (useful heuristic, but some may disagree) than in lynalden's posts. Economics is harder to separate from politics compared to other sciences, so it's especially useful to read multiple points of view and understand what the biases of authors lie/what the ongoing debates are. One thing I dislike about lynalden is her tendency to present as the one "true" economics Milton Friedman's monetarist theory of inflation, and doing so without explicitly calling out the hidden assumptions being made along the way or considering other theories of economics (e.g. Keynesian). OTOH, Noah and Brad can be categorized as Keynesian economists, so they present a more left-leaning view of the field of economics where the quantity theory of money is not accepted whole cloth.