Showing posts with label bill gates. Show all posts
Showing posts with label bill gates. Show all posts

Thursday, 19 September 2019

Bill Gates: “Economists don’t actually understand macroeconomics”


The only way to get a far more advanced understanding of Macroeconomics is to trace it in Real-Time via supercomputers, and indeed, quantum computers. It would be possible to uncloak the Invisible Hand...of the economy. This is explained in the following link  https://wiki.p2pfoundation.net/Transfinancial_Economics

By Kevin J. Delaney & Allison Schrager
Bill Gates takes a dim view of economists’ ability to know what’s going on in the economy.
“Too bad economists don’t actually understand macroeconomics,” the Microsoft co-founder noted during a recent interview with Quartz. Asked what he meant by that, Gates continued:
“It’s not like physics where you take certain inputs and you predict certain outputs. Will interest rates ever return to normal, and why aren’t they returning to normal? You won’t get a consensus between economists quite the way that if you dropped a ball out your window and called up physicists and asked, ‘What the hell happened?’ There’s so many factors including what [economist John Maynard] Keynes called ‘animal spirits’ in the economic equation that we don’t have predictability. Even today, people are still arguing about what happened in 2008. So it’s even harder to look forward. [Look at] the role of the bond rating agencies in 2008, which is completely unreformed. Why would that be? Well, there must be a lack of consensus.”
Gates is right, in a way: Economists don’t understand much about the macroeconomy. No one does. Any responsible economist is the first to admit that.

As opposed to microeconomics, which looks at the economy at the level of individual businesses and consumers, macroeconomics aims to explain the interaction of different factors that affect the economy as a whole, such as how interest rates impact macro variables like unemployment, inflation, and economic growth.
As Gates points out, the economy is complex and ever changing. Economists try to make sense of it by developing mathematical models that describe how the different factors relate to each other, and test the accuracy of those models using past data. But the macroeconomy has millions of moving parts that affect each other. Knowing what to include or exclude, and if the economy has changed from when data were collected, is never straightforward—which is why economists tend to disagree on almost everything.
Economic models are always incomplete, but it’s hard to argue that we’d be better off without them. Economists’ research has contributed to fewer people living in poverty, low predictable inflation, and less risk and uncertainty. Macroeconomic models offer a logical, consistent framework to help policymakers understand how people and different factors may respond to a new tax, benefit, or regulation.
Gates’s critique of economists follows several decades of rapid expansion in the field’s influence on policymaking and popular culture. His comment came during the interview as he discussed concerns about a global recession:
“The idea of negative 10-year rates, or now in Germany’s case, negative 30-year rates, this is macroeconomically uncharted territory. As Warren Buffett says, go through any economics textbook and find a reference to negative interest rates—you won’t find it. And yet, almost half the government debt in the world today, if you take out US debt, the majority of government debt bears negative interest rates. And there are certain reasons why that should not be the case, but it is the case. There’s always the risk of an economic recession, and trade wars increase that risk, and the [recent] macroeconomic figures increase that risk quite a bit. But I’m not in control of that. I get to pick which HIV scientists to fund and I get to pitch which malaria drugs to go after, or new ways of killing mosquitos. I don’t have some global economic levers up here in my foundation office.”

Wednesday, 20 February 2013

People-Centred Economic Development

You are here

Main menu

About P-CED

P-CED began in Chapel Hill,  North Carolina in early 1997.
P-CED is now based in UK as a profit-for-purpose company, since 2004.  We conduct small business for profit in UK, and invest profits for social purpose under profit-for-purpose rules in UK.  This is somewhat similar to non-profit in the US, except we can conduct any business we see fit according to normal business rules without restrictions that bind non-profits or charities.  We pay company and personal taxes according to usual business rules.  Profits are not shielded in any way from normal taxation that any for-profit business has to pay.  Whatever is left over is invested in the social purpose or purposes of our own choosing.  That way we can do business in the normal, traditional way, changing only one thing: the output, what happens with profit.
P-CED has advocated and pursued that model since inception in 1996-97 in the US.  The design is very straightforward: do business as usual, and invest profits for social benefit.  The US has been slow on the uptake with the profit-for-purpose thinking, UK much faster, so we instituted in the UK in 2004.  More on the inception of P-CED is in the "History" page.  Bill Gates, for one, came around to this way of thinking in 2001.
Our social purpose is poverty relief and childcare reform in the former Soviet Union.  Core framework is straightforward: to build bridges of friendship based on common ground for the common good in the former Soviet bloc.  We firmly believe that this "soft power" approach to international relations is inevitably the only solid ground for establishing and building understanding, good will and peace.  We have therefore pursued that strategy from the beginning of P-CED.  (Sounds like "Peace Ed, short for Peace Education.)
 We research and design regional and national programs.  More about these programs are in the "Projects" section.  We continue throughout with advocacy and activism in raising awareness of stakeholders we aim to help: vulnerable children, and people in poverty, first.
These problems almost always stem from government corruption that was a way of life in the USSR, and remains so to varying degrees.  Hence the overall process of what we do in promoting change inevitably runs into varying degrees of conflict along the way.  Dealing with such things as threats and smears is as much a part of projects as the hope and good will built within communities for standing up to it.  Hope, good will, and improved lives far outweigh the stresses and strains mounted by corrupt government officials, so strife and institutional resistance to change are taken in stride as part of the change process.