Use to discuss topics unrelated to recent posts.
Leave a Reply
This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.
This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.
Powered by WordPress & Theme by Anders Norén
Oakchair
“After all, what were seashells but empty coffins? What were starfish on the beach but bloated corpses, rotting in an alien environment?” –Nod by Adrian Barne
“Everything that’s been done to us we carry forever.” –This tender land by William Krueger
“Where were you born?”
“On a battlefield”
“No, no. In what state were you born?”
“In a state of innocence.” —Catch-22
——
“a retrospective propensity score-matched cohort study”
“Study outcomes included major acute cardiovascular events (MACE), diabetes mellitus and its complications, kidney diseases, musculoskeletal diseases, obesity, and malignancy.”
Statin users were compared with non-statin users “with no statistically significant differences in all baseline characteristics”
Tables 2 and 3 show the results.
The only statistically significant results were a 2.26-2.86 increased OR for diabetes among statin users depending on adjustments for confounders.
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/28185810/
——
This review was funded in part by The Robert Wood Johnson foundation which is a private foundation funded by Johnson and Johnson stock which is a Statin manufacturer.
(Acknowledgment section)
“two recent meta-analyses of large-scale placebo-controlled and standard care-controlled trials, which, respectively, observed a 9% [odds ratio 1.09; 95% confidence interval (CI) 1.02–1.17] and 13% (risk ratio 1.13; 95% CI 1.03–1.23) increased risk for incident diabetes associated with statin therapy.”
These meta-analyses were done of studies designed, and performed by statin manufactures with around half a dozen biases to make the drugs look better than they are.
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC3341610/
—–
A study funded by organizations who advocate and prescribe statins was performed.
“A total of 8,749 non-diabetic participants, aged 45-73 years, were followed up for 5.9 years.”
“Participants on statin treatment had a 46% increased risk of type 2 diabetes”
“The risk was dose dependent”
“Decreases in insulin sensitivity and insulin secretion were dose dependent”
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/25754552/
——
“liver injury due to statins has been reported to occur 1.9%-5.5% of patients” (3 different prospective studies).
“In early clinical trials, elevations of aminotransferases (liver damage) were observed in up to 2% of patients”
“it is well known that there is a huge underreporting of adverse drug reactions and these figures are likely to be a large underestimation”
Statin “induced autoimmune hepatitis has been well documented”
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/27860156/
——
“Of all that we’re asked to give others in this life, the most difficult to offer may be forgiveness.” –This tender land by William Krueger
“What we can’t change has to be a church’, Paul. Get it?”– Nod by Adrian Barnes
“They agreed that it was neither possible nor necessary to educate people who never questioned anything.” –Catch-22
bruce wilder
I have mentioned before that last Summer I set myself as a retirement project editing the Wikipedia article on “Deflation”. It is objectively a badly written article, marred by the attempts of cranks, well-meaning and otherwise. I would have to learn a fair amount of economics and economic history I never mastered to accomplish anything, so it seemed like an open-ended hobby project that might occupy time. Like gardening, but unfortunately without an independent biology to rescue the botany with surprises. Lots of old and older books and papers to read in other words.
What I did not expect is that AI would cut me off at the pass. xAI’s Grok has been busily rewriting the “Deflation” article on the canvas of Grokipedia. And, doing a superficially credible job. I write “superficially” to give my own non-performance in comparison an out.
The Grokipedia format requires a neutral, encyclopedic voice, similar in that regard to Wikipedia. Wikipedia is struggling to maintain a neutral voice and a tone of objectivity where topics become mired in controversy over “truth”.
“Deflation” as a topic centers an unsolved intellectual problem in economics: the economic functions and continuing evolution of money and finance. Much of conventional textbook economic analysis is premised on being able to abstract away from the institutional details of actual money in reasoning about price formation and business cycles. There’s a lot of handwaving going on in Econ 101 even in the easy chapters, but it goes into overtime when it comes to the intersection of money and what is humorlessly called the “real” economy. The latter is presumed to be driven by mythic “market” processes toward “market equilibrium”; the money that enumerates the all-important “market prices” is a transparently invisible numeraire.
The problem for an article about “deflation” is that the frameworks of conventional economics distinguish the “real” from “monetary” factors in a very muddled fashion. Grudgingly, economists may concede that in transactional practice, all purchases of goods and services for money must be financed and by extension aggregate demand is made effective aggregate demand by the availability of money. But, no one really knows, when access to cash and credit expands, what determines how much output expands and how much prices rise. Even less, does anyone understand what happens or why, when access to credit and cash contracts and the vacuum tugs on prices to fall and output to contract. It all happens in a fog.
The seeming logical possibility that technological progress could simultaneously drive a broad swath of prices down stands as a conceptual challenge: how to distinguish the effects of “real” technological progress from the dynamics of monetary factors?
Humans — even or especially “experts” — struggle (mostly unsuccessfully) to write or talk sensibly about “deflation”. Mathematical modeling of macroeconomic theories has failed as a path out of the muddle.
As AI has appeared on the horizon and Grok has labored away on this task I cannot myself do, I wonder, what we can expect from AI on such a controversial topic?
The hypesters, in their fever dreams, imagine AI advancing from “enhanced web search” to mounting the threshold of agi to “doing science”. It seems to me that Grok, on the topic of “deflation”, has threaded the needle of controversy in web-available source material by the expedient of becoming verbose in reporting the accumulated bull excretions. The Grokipedia article gets longer, its topic outline becomes more orderly, the voice more consistently grammatical in the standard register employed. It looks to me in this example case, that AI in the virtual person of Grok, encyclopedia editor, is simply automating the generation of verbiage.
What I cannot quite grasp is what this application of AI is doing to human discussion of the topic? Is the right analog, perhaps, chess? Some people went on playing chess after computer programs achieved grandmaster levels of “skill”. Now the fashion is for computer-aided evaluation of positions as a way to base critiques and commentary.
There is a curious if esoteric controversy over the Depression of 1873-79. Students of the reactionary “Austrian School” tend to have sunny views of this episode. The Second Industrial Revolution was continuing to accelerate with expanding railroads, growing steel output, advances in applied electricity and chemistry, and rapid advances in steam navigation. Contemporaries complained of poor business conditions, high industrial unemployment, falling wages, high rates of business bankruptcy. The conventional view of early business cycle scholars counted the recession that followed the Panic of 1873 as the longest in American history, but more recent scholars, driven in part by the availability of private foundation money for reactionary causes, have argued for revision. Gross “real” output, driven by rapid population growth and the opening of arable land to cultivation by the expanding rail net, it is argued, means the recession can not be rightly reckoned to have lasted as long as the misery reported in newspapers. The monetary policy of the U.S. Treasury was deflationary, aimed explicitly at restoring convertibility of the Greenback currency into gold coin at par, and denying the length of the recession and emphasizing “real output growth” serves to distract attention from the effects of a monetary policy of deflation.
I wonder if AI will be purposed by interested parties to arbitrate this dispute in favor of the “Austrian” view that the recession of 1873-79 was short and the monetary policy of deflation had positive effects. It occurs to me that if interested parties seed the online corpus from which AI draws its “training” in language expression, on a topic like this, where the logic of the arguments is unresolved in models and the statistical data is thin and of poor quality, AI can be used to champion a Narrative and deprecate better quality analysis and data (if there is any).
It is discouraging. The way the game was played before AI was not productive imho, which is a prime reason the Wikipedia article on “Deflation” is so bad. The grammar might improve and the sheer volume of verbiage might expand. But, will any thinking happen? Or, will thinking just get buried?
bruce wilder
If you read the practice guidelines on prescribing statins, you’d think doctors were having extended chats with their patients about vaguely understood risks and benefits — nothing like that takes place in our financialized health care systems. In real life, the prescriptions have been handed out at scale, as if the benefits were large and the risks vanishingly small. To the individual, nothing is so clear. Obviously, if you are that 1 in 200 or so who avoids a heart attack, the benefit is great, but if you are the unlucky individual, who experiences the onset of diabetes, suffers muscle pain, et cetera, it is not clear there was any off-setting benefit for you personally.
Research methods have not been purposed to isolate accurately who stands to benefit and who will bear downside risks. Benefits and risks are distributed outcomes, with radically differing distributions across populations. medical research protocols are not figuring out who is who, which is maybe not advancing medical practice, case by case.
Roy Batty
Why hasn’t China taken Taiwan? At this point it seems virtually risk free..
spud
bruce wilder:
it is well known and proven, that smith, marx and keynes basically have proven that socialism works, and that freidman, hayek and rand pushed crank science
http://www.huppi.com/kangaroo/L-chimain.htm
Myth: The Chicago School of Economics is a leader in the field.
Fact: The Chicago School has lost academic clout.
Summary
The Chicago School of Economics is a hotbed of conservative economics that has won eight Nobel prizes and considerable influence in the field. But its stock is rapidly falling. “Monetarism is dead” is the catch-phrase that economists use to describe Milton Friedman’s monetary theory.
Rational Expectations, although still widely admired, has lost currency in academia. The Coase theorem has taken a drubbing in the academic literature. Public Choice theory is so flawed that it actually predicts that people won’t vote.
There is also a backlash against the over-reliance on math and perfect starting assumptions so heavily used by the Chicago School. Furthermore, the Chicago School tried their economic policies for sixteen years in near-laboratory conditions in Chile.
The results were exactly what liberals predicted: falling wages for workers, soaring incomes for the rich, the destruction of social programs without sufficient replacement, wild swings in the economy, and some of the worst pollution in the world.
Even the string of Nobel prizes that the Chicago School has won appears to be the work of Assar Lindbeck, the right-wing Swedish economist who heads the Nobel prize selection committee for economics.
Argument
The following essays should serve not only as a readable primer to the Chicago School of Economics, but to the field of economics as a whole. Enjoy.
Introduction
The Methodology of the Chicago School
A Review of Keynesian Theory
Milton Friedman and Monetarism
Milton Friedman and the Natural Rate of Unemployment
Robert Lucas and Rational Expectations
Ronald Coase and the Coase Theorem
The Laboratory Test: Chile
All those Nobels…
————————-
http://www.huppi.com/kangaroo/L-ausmain.htm
Myth: The Austrian School of Economics is “apart and above” mainstream economics.
Fact: The Austrian School is a classic example of crank science.
Summary
The Austrian School of Economics is a tiny group of libertarians at war with mainstream economics. They reject even the scientific method that mainstream economists use, preferring to use instead a pre-scientific approach that shuns real-world data and is based purely on logical assumptions.
But this is the very method that thousands of religions use when they argue their opposing beliefs, and the fact that the world has thousands of religions proves the fallibility of this approach.
Academia has generally ignored the Austrian School, and the only reason it continues to exist is because it is financed by wealthy business donors on the far right. The movement does not exist on its own scholarly merits.
Argument
To describe and critique an entire school of economic thought in one short essay is impossible. Therefore, we’ll do it in several short essays.
Introduction
The Scientific Method
Statistics
Methodological Subjectivism
Methodological Individualism
Starting Assumptions
The Market Process
Monopolies
The Gold Standard and Business Cycle
The History of the Austrian School
The Politics of the Austrian School
——————
free trade is inflationary/deflationary in nature. how can that be?
well the balance of payments is real money, and must be injected into the economy to pay for offshore goods and services.
that money gets recycled back into the economy fueling inflation, which deflates wages, as well as the trade deficit deflates wages.
japan was a prime example of how deflation and free trade are joined at the hip.
japan never addressed their wage problem, because japanese capitalist parasites took the profits and sent them off shore to buy up real estate like radio city music hall in new york, and stocks, fueling bubbles in america, which fueled even more deflation of wages, and inflation of prices.
the japanese people were being worked to death, off the clock work could be 10-40 hours extra a week, but paid for forty hours. suicide and early death became the norm.
wages were being under cut in two countries, yet the inflation of prices roared in both countries.
then the inevitable, both countries went into recession, like who’da ever thunk.
it took japan decades to escape deflation, because they addressed the rich concerns, just like obama and did not address the real problem, deflation of wages and a lack of re-investment of profits.
today japan can’t compete with china.
once deflation sets in, its hard to escape it, and with much of the western world still is in the feverish grip of the clintonites and blairites, once deflation sets in, and with no real production that backs up their economies, remember, FDR still had the factories. escaping deflation will be extremely hard to defeat.
the gold standard and austerity, is like pouring jet fuel on a bonfire.
it deflates wages even more, and makes debts harder to pay off, in fact, like germany found out by 1933, its impossible to deflate your economy into growth.
the long depression was a example of ignoring deflation. by 1895, our government started to buy bonds for infrastructure, and walla, we escaped the depression.
from 1893-1895, the long depression was so bad, that we had more people leaving america then were coming in, and it was estimated somewhere around 25% of the population was starving.
so deflation is really a modern phenomenon, most people live in cities, very few farm. we have no real production capabilities. if deflation sets in, within 30 days millions will be turned out into the streets, and massive business failures. you are watching this happen now in real time. and the real economy has been contracting since about the late 1990’s.
bill clinton rigged the unemployment statistics to ignore the long time unemployed, and altered the GDP stats to reflect finance over production.
setting up the perfect economic storm washing over the west right now.
forcing re-investment into your people and industry seems like deflation, but its what FDR and the smoot-hawley tariffs did, and china is merely copying that.
mago
Thinking buried. Hahaha. Dead and gone and ten feet under.
Aside from that, the US is not staffed by serious people working for the common good, which is self evident, and although that’s not what I set out to say, it’s what I said.
I’ll return later with more. That’s neither threat nor promise. Just talking to myself and the wind.
bruce wilder
And, unnecessary for any purpose, for the same reasons it appears “risk-free” to you, no?
Mark Level
I am getting some schadenfreude and laughs from the Eric Swallwell scandal, because at one point I knew Swallwell casually.
In the Bay Area school district I worked in, my best friend, who had over a period of 3 years changed our School Board from a bunch of teacher-hating scuzzbags to a more friendly bunch, running our union PAC, and most of us precinct walking to change things.
At one time, before my friend Brian took on that job, 5 of 5 Board Members were Mormons, Mormon mafia. And NO the community was at best 12% Mormon, so this in no way reflected local demographics.
Anyway, my friend had gone to High School with some Swallwell brothers, I had met him and introduced myself, shook his hand at a debate when he was running against a right wing asshole, he at least seemed nominally Left at the time. On a day when the school had a (usually dumb and useless) “Rally” schedule, my buddy recommended he could get Swallwell to come speak to the students about education and the community, etc.
It went over pretty well, he charmed the students. I said hello to him again, he knew I ran the school Library and offered to donate some of his government records, “achievements” with the school. I said sure, why not?
My mentally ill principle was going after me hard at this time. He was far gone in bipolar disorder, a deranged man who would scream at people publicly, even people he didn’t know, once it was a staff day at the other High School he went off on a total stranger in front of a decent-size crowd. He was widely hated or laughed at by staff, Admin liked to have a rabid attack dog, however, so he was pretty well-protected. Many feared him as well, of course.
I saw the political value in a temporary alliance with Swallwell, despite sensing he was a pretty conventional politician and pretty shallow. Desperate not to be vulnerable, I took the opportunity. My principle’s hate-on for me was because I was known to be one of the top Union people behind the scenes. I’d been grievance chair for 6 years, a time-consuming and difficult job holding abusive admin. to account. My Union President got jealous of my popularity and dismissed me, after she had crumbled on a case I had won, and I later called her on it when she was stupid enough to slander me in an email and try to drive me out of my position, post-grievance chair. I proved the slander, I had the proof in an email to another activist, when I was on a leadership team, they suddenly did a technical change to deny me a vote with others. She’d lied that I was “illegally voting” and my email to the colleague, one of her closest friends, shared that I was frustrated at not being able to vote.
Anyway, I shared the kind gift from Swallwell with the school site, the School Board, etc. in email. It was a small feather in my cap. I had a friend who’d been my former MLIS professor on the Board, she was one of the people who replied to all in gratitude. A bit of gravitas on my side against future principal attacks. (Which did come for some years, but never succeeded as he was deeply stupid as well as erratic. In the midst of Covid, we both took a Golden Handshake to retire early, left at the same time.)
I paid attention and laughed at the first Swallwell scandal, with the Asian Honeypot spy, evidently from China. It validated my sense he was shallow and a typical pol. This latest disgrace is beyond that, one rape alleged when the victim was drunk, other incidents as well, he is toast. Character is Destiny. If I had had a chance to ally with the likes of say, Adam Schiff, I never would’ve, a lying scumbag on the surface. Swallwell didn’t seem that odious at the time, but live and learn.
bruce wilder
@spud
Critiquing economic theory is a perilous enterprise, as Marx demonstrated at great, indeed tedious, length. You can lose your way very easily. Two of the critical chapters of Keynes’ General Theory are simply unreadable.
Friedman’s monetarism was founded on reviving a quantity theory of money premised on money being a commodity, and applying that theory to counterfactually narrate the history of a payment system trading credit in which “quantity” makes less sense than physics in a dream.
The thing about the Coase Theorem that economists miss is that Coase taught in a Law School. It isn’t a theory of “markets”; it is a theory of courtrooms. An efficient response to externalities requires the public good of legal arbitration, using state power to impose a cost on one party only. Stigler retold the tale and confused everyone about it being an occasion for transactional pseudo-market “exchange” when, in fact, the only payment must be to the third-party public authority.
Mises infamously advocated for the a priori validity of economic logic, and Friedman for a bastard pragmatism of whatever “works” as a predictor, however implausible the assumptions used to construct it. Many academics pile up tractability assumptions like jenga blocks.
Hayek’s greatest influence came from his vision of the market economy using price information to effectively form a computing engine functionally equivalent to a fantastically efficient socialist central planning ministry. Hayek observed correctly that actual market prices did not vary enough in practice to contain or convey enough information for that to work. What neoliberal economists took from that admission against interest was the loose conviction that labor markets could be improved by being made more “flexible” so wages might more easily fall.
For all the pretense to rigor, academic economics is loosey-goosey, its well-trod paths of pretended reason are full of potholes empty of evidence and end not at any useful destination, but at ill-chosen overlooks, with a lot of handwaving across a distant landscape remote from close observation.
Still, may be a case of “can’t live without it”. I do not hold out much hope for untutored good intentions.
bruce wilder
Is the “common good” self-evident? Or, is it the unseriousness of the staff, which is self-evident?
I would say the unseriousness of the staff is made evident by their unconcern to make any effort to discover, define or invent the common good.
Neoliberalism rationalizes unconcern with the common good. Public pursuit of private ends.
spud
bruce wilder:
yet, not much, if anything at all holds up the chicago school, or the austrian school of economics.
their vague assumptions are built on sand. even if they get something right, they assume it away.
everywhere its utilized, ends up in collapse.
yep, keynes was only jelling the obvious. debunking accepted crank science is never easy.
mago
Ok bruce wilder. Point well taken. Thanks.
Mark Level’s personal anecdote is most interesting. I have to wonder though if this isn’t another Me Too incident. I don’t know enough to tell, and while not possessed of a suspicious mind, I’ve smelled my share of dead fish. I don’t put anything past anybody, not even the Dalai Lama. (Don’t strike me with a lightning bolt dear god. I renounce and repent.)
And so the treachery flows unabated.