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To be fair, the purpose of referencing the Google Scholar citation was not to support the claim that econometricians predicted no decline in manufacturing, it w
by Kranar 5y ago
To be fair, the purpose of referencing the Google Scholar citation was not to support the claim that econometricians predicted no decline in manufacturing, it was to refute your claim that:
"Econometricians are unlikely to have made predictions about NAFTA."
I don't know why you would have made such a claim since it should be fairly obvious that econometricians made numerous predictions of all sorts.
I will respect your stance on the issue, you are obviously very informed on the subject and seem passionate about it and that deserves respect, but I'm more sympathetic to OP's point of view that econometricians have not produced much in the way of a consensus on any kind of prediction. Whether we look at the 90s at NAFTA, or the rise of China or other third world countries, or Brexit, or even less global topics and instead pick more local and focused subjects such as the minimum wage, rent control, tax policy... you can basically pick any position on such topics and you won't find anything close to a consensus on it.
- huitzitziltzin 5y agoI didn’t address that point because it would seem extremely pedantic. To an economist, “an econometrician” is almost always someone who spends their time developing new estimators and proving things about their properties. The people who wrote the CBO report are very unlikely to have been econometricians according to nearly any economist. The CBO mostly hires applied people of various kinds, whether in micro or macro. They are users of econometrics, as we all are, but to say they are “econometricians” as economists use that term would be wrong. But that seemed like an extremely pedantic objection to the OPs point.