jks
Barkley Rosser <rosserjb at jmu.edu> wrote: Well, jks has already made a pretty reasonable response, but I'll add a bit, although I shall not follow up as my experience is that if someone denounces all of econ as "drivel" with a silly argument, they are not about to be convinced of the contrary by anything that anybody else says, especially somebody advertising themself to be a "technical economist" (and I am, very much so). Anyway, to be more specific, Bill, I was summarizing a huge array of studies, initially from surveys, then from experiments, and now from carefully studied real world cases. Each of these was very specific and in a specific context, so it would take hundreds of pages to describe all of them for you with their particular contexts, etc. blah blah. But their volume is now overwhelming and the results are now incontrovertible, although the exact ratio depends on details, circumstances, etc. I gave this list a kind of ball park typical figure, and indeed it was studying environmental issues where this was first observed, although it has now been studied to death in many other contexts. I think Carrol Cox's example about his inherited piano is a very good example.
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