(((George Soros)))

There are a lot of industries that rely upon the weather. Big, important industries. Tourism, obviously, since nobody wants to visit an attraction while the weather is poor. Construction and agriculture are obvious, too, since many construction jobs can't be done when it's too cold or too wet, and crops are variously sensitive to the weather as well, and either can't be grown or require expensive interventions. Many kinds of entertainment depend upon the weather, too, including sports. That, in turn, affects retail, restaurants, and other kinds of entertainment: a sports game attracts people to sports bars, but if a game is delayed due to weather, those people will often go shopping, watch movies, or go to family restaurants. Severe weather, including earthquakes and hurricanes, can disrupt some businesses - like utilities and oil refineries - and stimulate others, like construction and disaster relief suppliers. The weather is arguably the single strongest macroeconomic influence.

So in order to predict macroeconomic outcomes, you need to be able to predict the weather. Likewise, to change macroeconomic outcomes, you need to change the weather. The United States is a superpower, but it can't change the weather*. And I'm not sure what stories the Republicans tell each other about George Soros, but I'm pretty sure he can't change the weather either.

Basically, your post was a non-sequitur. The question of whether or not "macroeconomics" is "useful" is not helpful, because I don't think the person asking the question understands either what macroeconomics is, or what useful should mean.

A few months ago, you suggested, for example, that government tax revenue might actually increase after a tax cut. This was, in your own words, a take on the Laffer Curve, a bit of pernicious macroeconomic reasoning that was invented by Ronald Reagan's cabinet to support his own tax cut. So it doesn't seem like you have a problem with macroeconomics, per se, or even a problem with how the government is using macroeconomics to support their political agenda. I actually have no idea what your grievance with macroeconomics is, then, since you've previously found macroeconomic arguments quite useful.

Macroeconomics is literally a study of the whole economy. Is it useful, for example, to estimate how household energy expenditures might be affected by a severe hurricane in Houston? Because that's a macroeconomic effect. Answering this question is obviously useful; this specific example is a matter of strategic significance.

Is macroeconomics useful for setting broad policies? I don't think it is. It's not normally possible to perform studies the same way as e.g. medicine does them. You can only infer results from found experiments, and try to rule out confounding variables. This is a major limitation and, in my opinion, macroeconomics is only useful for describing what has already happened, and it is not useful for policy selection. But at the same time, you don't seem to have an actual problem with using macroeconomics to set policy. Which only leaves the descriptive part of economics... like you have a problem with people looking at what's already happened, and reporting on the root cause? That would be a ridiculous complaint.

So what's this comment about? Is macroeconomics just some republican whipping boy now, or what? Where'd you hear this stuff about macroeconomics?

Edit: Updated to more accurately reflect my sincere confusion about Wookie06's complaint.

Edit 2: * Weather and climate mean different things. Don't even ****in say it bro.

Can't wait for Trump to privitize all the GIS infrastructure / weather satellites.

Why don't we turn the country into one giant corporation, and let their board of directors decide if Miami is worth saving.

lol, well at least Stalinism would make a decision.

y'all need to stop worrying about building a wall on your southern border, and start worrying about building walls on your coasts.

weird ass Americans building all of your cities in imminent death zones

ima gonna put 200,000 houses on ocean landfill in an earthquake zone. lmao what is soil liquefaction?? sounds like a problem for the free market!

In 1920, Ludwig von Mises resolved the economic calculation debate by showing that socialist economies are inherently bad at predicting how to allocate resources.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economic_calculation_problem

Don't forget:

cryptokitties.co

But yeah those are the two.

Same with voting, unless you're massively wealthy you can't affect politics. So you, Wookie, should definitely stop voting.

Of course he did. Did they give him a gold star, or... uh... rub his tummy...? I'm actually not sure how to praise a Libertarian. Let him torture a black kid? Yeah, that's probably the right way to go.

Ironically, if we had a revolution the result would most likely be Stalinist state corporatism, because after 80 years of not being allowed to talk about any kind of leftist economics other than the evil system used by our mortal enemies, most of us think central planning is the only alternative to capitalism. Yay!

In 1950, Kenneth Arrow resolved the democracy debate by showing that voting can never work.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arrow%27s_impossibility_theorem

That's easy. The way to praise a libertarian is to give him money.

(or other forms of property)

Not slaves, though! Coercion is strictly prohibited in a libertarian society.

So only if the black kid sold his right to be tortured.

But would it be able to save the coastal cities?

Oh yeah, that's a fun one.

Wookie your political movement is worst than Stalinism!

You are free to do whatever you want. Be enslaved by a capitalist for your survival. Die of exposure. Lots of options.

All these right-wing belief systems sound good on paper, but just don't work in the real world, do they?

At least Stalinism is an ethos, dude.

Who got fed when the wheat harvest failed?

When your system converges to the things your axioms prohibits when implemented in practice, I'd say that this is as good a proof by contradiction as any.

If I am remembering this correctly, libertarians fetishize Grover Cleveland because he didn't give federal money to starving farmers. Supposedly this gesture of purity is impressive to them.

It's almost like it's a religion that sacrifices humans to the god of $

you ****in leftist, you just don't understand. Conservatives are realistic and pragmatic unlike you and your elitist ivory tower social scientists. We live in the real world and work real jobs. Your "ideas" and "numbers" might sound good on paper, but get down here in the trenches with us hard-workin sincere nose-to-the-grindstone folks and you'll see how important it is that we give away 95% of the value of our labor to someone we have never met before.

Looks like BTC reaching new heights again. Predictions about its future?

Goes down again?

Winklevoss, more like Winkle-loss, amirite?

(In reality, I have no idea)

Undampened feedback loop feedbacks to an undampened new value. Will it loop?? Will it feedback???

You crazy commies and your unrealistic communist "join a union" talk. As if that would ever change anything, like a shorter work week or improved working conditions, but even if it did, **** that, I want longer work weeks and worse working conditions because the harder I work the more I'll get ahead. Saying that my boss will continue to act the way he currently does, and will not reward me for the work I'm doing unless someone forces him to, is ridiculous ivory tower egghead make-believe. Get down here in the REAL WORLD.

Regarding Wookie and macro, if I am to understand his past posts correctly, it's that he thinks we shouldn't waste money researching things that we can't change anyway.

"Too big to try"

Why would a RATIONAL employer in the REAL WORLD pay anybody less than what they're worth? I'd discuss this ridiculous unrealistic elitist crackpottery with my coworkers but we're not allowed to talk about our pay.

Well, you see, if it happened in the real world, then by definition that's the amount that they are worth. The only other possibility is that we don't have a perfectly free market, which would mean that the only option available to us is to further dismantle the government.

We shouldn't have a census, because if the government knew how many firefighters they needed to hire, they might have to spend tax money to pay them.

Four legs good, two legs bad.

Corporations good, government bad.

Uber can implement whatever top-down policy it wants, but Washington can't implement any.

White people can own any property they want; black people, you should try harder

I still think that libertarian conservatives are the political equivalent of this.

"Let's get all the people who are oblivious to obvious contradictions and form a political movement out of it. Then there is no limit to what we can get them to believe!

P.S.: You should recruit from big churches, since that will get you a head start on the above"

So I'll admit you guys aren't cancer like the actual capitalists, but now that we're speaking in the category of physical ailments, I can say this without being crass: you're retarded.

By the homesteading principle, does Neil Armstrong own the entire moon?

The only people I've ever met who've praised the efficiency of corporations over government are people who are either so poor and irrelevant that they've never significantly interacted with one, or so rich that everybody bends over backwards to serve them. The US government is inefficient because the Republican Party wants it to be inefficient. And yet corporations, on the inside, are more byzantine and wasteful and inept than you can possibly imagine. Your petty gripes about the DMV and IRS have ****ing nothing on casual interactions with any major American corporate HR/benefits/payroll departments, and unlike the government there is no actual excuse for them to be terrible. Don't even have a ****ing clue what they're talking about, but they sure don't let that stop them from saying the government should be run more like a business.

You know what?

The US already runs its government like a corporation. And its corporations are run like the government. You get the **** end of both, and the benefits of neither. **** you, stop voting.

The government should be run like the military.

Or, scratch that. Let's just make them the same entity. (And corporations, throw them in too for good measure.)