To be completely honest, I don’t know enough about economics or life outside of the state I live in the United States to have any clue which candidate will affect the world for the better. I want to understand what it is I should do according to my values (not just regarding voting, but in general), but the world is such a big place that I can’t even begin to fathom how I would go about trying to figure this out. Does anyone have any advice about where to start, what resources to consult? I want to shut up and multiply, but I don’t even know what I’m multiplying!
I want to understand what it is I should do according to my values (not just regarding voting, but in general), but the world is such a big place that I can’t even begin to fathom how I would go about trying to figure this out. Does anyone have any advice about where to start, what resources to consult? I want to shut up and multiply, but I don’t even know what I’m multiplying!
For politics there is a lot going on, but one of the biggest of big picture items is macro-economic philosophy. If you get your macro right, you are most of the way there on issues like prosperity and job creation which are a big component of what matters to people’s daily lives.
-Look at what the big schools of macroeconomics have to say
-Pick some schools which have actual models (i.e. not just talk and rhetoric) that are capable of making at least directional predictions about changes in GPD /GPD growth, interest rates, inflation etc. in response to changes to various components of spending.
-Pull a representative model out of a text book or article that’s at least 8 years old to avoid something that’s just been fit to recent data
-Do a Google search to see if other people have gotten similar or different results to you and to see if there are any known pitfalls in the data which might impact your results
-Repeat above 3 steps for each school of economics that seemed worth checking
More simply, you could just ask economists directly. But then they might tell you that the US President has very little impact on the economy.
The linked IGM poll is great though, it can also give you a good feel for which policies economists agree about, and their comments and links can give you some idea of their reasoning.
There are lots of LWers working on argument mapping software. I think that one day such software will actually be useful for answering questions like this.
To be completely honest, I don’t know enough about economics or life outside of the state I live in the United States to have any clue which candidate will affect the world for the better. I want to understand what it is I should do according to my values (not just regarding voting, but in general), but the world is such a big place that I can’t even begin to fathom how I would go about trying to figure this out. Does anyone have any advice about where to start, what resources to consult? I want to shut up and multiply, but I don’t even know what I’m multiplying!
For politics there is a lot going on, but one of the biggest of big picture items is macro-economic philosophy. If you get your macro right, you are most of the way there on issues like prosperity and job creation which are a big component of what matters to people’s daily lives.
-Look at what the big schools of macroeconomics have to say
-Pick some schools which have actual models (i.e. not just talk and rhetoric) that are capable of making at least directional predictions about changes in GPD /GPD growth, interest rates, inflation etc. in response to changes to various components of spending.
-Pull a representative model out of a text book or article that’s at least 8 years old to avoid something that’s just been fit to recent data
-Check the model with data from the St. Louis Fed and Euro Stat
-Do a Google search to see if other people have gotten similar or different results to you and to see if there are any known pitfalls in the data which might impact your results
-Repeat above 3 steps for each school of economics that seemed worth checking
More simply, you could just ask economists directly. But then they might tell you that the US President has very little impact on the economy.
The linked IGM poll is great though, it can also give you a good feel for which policies economists agree about, and their comments and links can give you some idea of their reasoning.
There are lots of LWers working on argument mapping software. I think that one day such software will actually be useful for answering questions like this.