The International Monetary Fund, after predicting that Britons would be “praying for the sweet release of death” with the Brexit vote, scaled back the gloom and doom:
After saying that leaving the European Union could trigger a UK recession, the International Monetary Fund now expects the British economy to grow by 1.7 per cent this year and 1.3 per cent next year.
That is weaker than the 1.9 and 2.2 per cent growth forecasts before the referendum, but the UK is still set to be the second-fastest growing economy in the Group of Seven industrialised nations this year – behind the United States – and third-fastest next year, behind the US and Canada.
Not that that’s any barn-burner growth rate – but since the IMF and the rest of Europe’s “elites” predicted a zombie apocalypse, I’d call this a signifcant development.
Perhaps some authoritative writer who’s been published by the London School of Economics will drop by and explain why this significant development occurred.
They didn’t vote the way the elites wanted them to. So this was a last ditch effort to try and get a second vote to overturn the first by temporarily crashing the pound and and trying to cause a major recession. Fortunately they don’t have anywhere near that power so the free market corrected once things calmed down
I predict Mitch will have to gray out an incoherent screed.
I didn’t know the IPCC dabbled in economic modeling, too.
What a libturd to do? Move the goalposts all the way to Cleveland?
+++ Mr. D.
Really, what’s going on is that Brexit threatens those whose business is central control, and the IMF is Exhibit A for that. Now at this point, the evidence is too strong for even them to ignore, and so they’ve got to dial it back.
And dealing with “the greyed out one” seems to be great practice for dealing with finely stated nonsense such as that which the IMF produced prior to the Brexit vote.
“People in this country have had enough of experts from organizations with acronyms saying that they know what is best and getting it consistently wrong.”
-Michael Gove.
If Britain will grow 1.7% this year after voting to leave the EU and the United States will grow 1.9% this year without ever having been in the EU, then is Brexit really a factor?
Criticism of the ‘cult of experts’ comes almost exclusively from the Right. The usual way of thinking on the Left is that while the experts may get things wrong, they are going to get things right more frequently than non-experts.
This is almost certainly true if you are looking at discrete, technical tasks. Common wisdom doesn’t help much if you are trying to build a spaceship to go to the moon.
But part of the problem with the cult of experts is that not all problems benefit from expert analysis. This is particularly true with problems that involve values. Only human beings can assign values to things, and the value that an expert assigns to a thing is just as much an opinion as the value that an ignorant person assigns to a thing.
In the 1920s and 1930s, experts determined that the best way to address the persistent social problems of crime and poverty was eugenics. The cult of eugenics had its expert advocates within the intellectual leadership of the United States as well as within Europe. The cult of experts had decided that a human life had an absolute value to society that could be calculated (by other experts). The experts decided that the nation would be stronger if the least valued parts of the population were discouraged from reproducing while the most valued parts of the population were encouraged to reproduce.
Today’s sociologists have not refined this idea. They have rejected it as completely as astronomers have rejected the idea that the heavens consist of crystal spheres whose motion is governed by ranks of angels.
Science benefits us not by simply giving us information about the natural world, but by giving us information that is consistent across time and space. Scientific knowledge can be built up from year to year and generation to generation. The humanities aren’t like that.
The population of Elizabethan England was about three million souls. According to the census bureau, that number is just a little larger than the number of people in the US with degrees in literature or language (https://www.census.gov/prod/2012pubs/acs-18.pdf).
Where is our Shakespeare, our Marlow, our Jonson?
Crap, this is turning into an essay.
Long story made short: a group of expert astrologers will be no better than a group of construction workers at predicting the future.
Where is our Shakespeare, our Marlow, our Jonson?
Probably either aborted or medicated from a early age.
Where is our Shakespeare, our Marlow, our Jonson?
I’ve wondered about the same thing regarding the literary output of the Founders of our country vs. that of today. What the heck happened? True classical education vs. emasculated “liberal arts” of today? Patronage vs. government sponsorship? Reduced freedom to actually create great theaters due to government regulation?
Today’s sociologists have not refined this idea. They have rejected it as completely as astronomers have rejected the idea that the heavens consist of crystal spheres whose motion is governed by ranks of angels.
And yet AGW continues its sordid march, undeterred by scientific evidence because id does not fit their narrative Well they (POC) are not marching. They are stuck. In ice. You can’t make this stuff up:
Whilst the NW passage is now nearly open (ahead of schedule), the situation is different on this side. The Kara sea (north of Siberia and close to Murmansk) which is traditionally full of ice at this time is open. But the Laptev sea (further East) appears solid. Solid right up to the beach. Keep checking their progress to see if they make it through the ice!
Of course, their hypothesis is arctic ice is receding and has now opened up a clear passage, that is why they are attempting this circumnavigation to prove their point. Which they most likely will not (but I wish them the best). But even a busted hypothesis will not deter these quackers from continuing to claim their theory is correct. AGW acolytes are worse than flat earth society.
Where is our Shakespeare, our Marlow, our Jonson?
Just proves to show these lit and language grads are not as smart as proverbial monkeys.
I should mention that the idea of the heavens being rotating crystal spheres was considered scientific at the time. Astronomers needed to describe the regularity of the motions of the heavenly bodies, which they did as well as their instruments allowed. It was the mechanism behind that regular motion that was thrown out in the 16th and 17th centuries. Their measurements were still good. Kepler was not a believer in the crystal sphere theory. Tycho Brahe was. Kepler used Tycho’s observations to derive his laws of planetary motion, and these are still taught to astronomy students today.
Just proves to show these lit and language grads are not as smart as proverbial monkeys.
How dare you insult monkeys like that
I submit, for your consideration, that we henceforth refer to Doggy as “Gray Doggy” until she either answers Mitch or slinks away in defeat.
She’s such a glutton for punishment though, that I suspect that name will stick at least for the rest of the decade.
I’ve wondered about the same thing regarding the literary output of the Founders of our country vs. that of today. What the heck happened? True classical education vs. emasculated “liberal arts” of today? Patronage vs. government sponsorship?
I’ll keep repeating: For the last 100 years or so, accelerated in the last 50 or so. Marx. Plank 10. Success! Laughing his ass off 6 feet under.
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We have an intern working in our group this summer. He told me they did not teach cursive writing in his middle school. Unrelated, but just as shocking, he also told me he was unaware that the Civil War started 3 hours from his house.
Where are our Shakespeare’s? You’re kidding, right? The question is, who will write the instructions on a bubble gum wrapper in 10 years?
Cursive is going out of style all over–which is sad, because it’s said that all kinds of mental abilities are related to being able to write that way. How do you sign a check if you don’t know cursive?
BB, most schools still teach how to write cursive to sign a document, but not much more. I know my nieces and nephews who went to public schools in another state never learned cursive. Yet another reason my kids never went to public schools.
And as economist David Jones said long ago, “Economists were created to make weather forecasters look good.” And that was more than 50 years ago, when weather forecasts were not nearly as good as they are now.
The IMF is infamous for being wrong on many a big issue. They had to do a mae culpa on the Argentine bankruptcy of 2002, and have had to do the same with Greece multiple times since then. That they have to correct what was obviously an overly emotional and political overreaction is hardly surprising.
I’m sure that the IMF is right in that short term economic growth will be hit by an uncertainty in events (it almost always is), but more than 2 years out I doubt that that will be the case. I’d argue that the British will provide a much more stable, long term economic environment overall than that provided by the EU. The EU has disruptions from Spain and Portugal (both with deficit spending beyond EU constraints that will stress the EU politically and the ECB directly), Italy (where bailouts of the banking sector are required and Italy is fighting with the EU over how and when to do them and with how much public money), Germany (where the banking sector is overexposed to derivatives and likely to need wholesale bailouts in any recession and where DB is actively lobbying for a bailout even now), and Greece (naturally) are all providing a much more volatile backdrop.