Famous Last Words by Bosses I've Had - <AUTHOR> http://edweissman.com/famous-last-words-by-bosses-ive-had <comment><AUTHOR> OP here. I just threw this together to have a little fun on a Friday morning. I knew I wasn't alone, but it's still nice when you guys remind me how much I'm not. It seems like there are two worlds for programmers these days: never having enough time to crank out that which must be built and dealing with alternate human reality in some institution.

These were just the tip of the iceberg. I'll probably have a bunch more next week.

Some specific feedback:

georgemcbay: When different stakeholders don't agree, I've learned 3 things: 1. You rarely make progress. 2. The only way to get them to agree is to put them in a room together and don't leave until they do agree (That's one time when you DO need a meeting). 3. My boss rarely understood (1) or (2). He was just worrying about his personal likes/dislikes. It's tough enough to convey this in a serious piece, but obviously a lot tougher in a light piece. Thanks for the feedback.

RyanMcGreal: I enjoyed Dilbert until the stories started striking too close to home. They became too real to be funny. Sad but true.

veyron: Actually, this company used 6 digit Ticket numbers. I shortened them for clarity. Remember it's a sequential numbering system, so that's the number of tickets since the beginning of time, not currently open tickets. Sadly, a typical meeting:

      Joe: How are we doing on 112182?
      Fred: I don't have that Ticket.
      Joe: Oh, maybe it should be 112128.
      Mary: No, that's in Ron's group.
      Fred: I must have written it down wrong. I mean the MJC Project.
      John: The MJC Project is on hold.
      Joe: Sorry, the MCJ Project.
      Mary: Who brought a laptop?
      Sue: I did. I'll search for MCJ.
      Fred: No, you'll get 500 tickets. Search for Joe Smith, open.
      Sue: OK, here it is. Ticket #118128.
      edw519: Kill me now.

EDIT: I am NOT making this up. Five minutes ago:

      Customer: I called you 10 minutes ago but you didn't answer.
      Me: I was here. Sometimes the IP phone doesn't ring.
      Customer: Why? Is it raining there?

<comment><USER3> By "last words", did you mean, "last words before they were fired/quit/'laid off'," or "last words before I, edw519, quit"?

<comment><USER4> I interpreted the title as "'famous last words'-material that my bosses tend to say."

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Here's my favorite personal story. I was a consultant, brought in on a project on-site at a client's location. This is my first day, and I'm meeting the VP of Marketing.

      VP: We need to get these Cognos reports up and running.
      Me: Hmm, ok. What can you tell me about these reports?
      VP: Mostly that we need them up and running.
      Me: Who uses these reports?
      VP: Not sure. Ask so-and-so.
      Me: What information is on these reports?
      VP: Look, let's not get buried in details. We just need these reports up and running, mmm-kay?

<comment><USER6> Reports with undefined intervals and the only "requirement" is the title?

That's easy, shouldn't take more than a couple of minutes. Empty reports with just a title are really friendly for the author and reader both.

<comment><USER7> I like that: "Test-first requirements analysis." A bit like shooting a monkey into space in an uninsulated tin can to see if there are any problems with that.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Oh man, these almost hit too close to home to be funny. True story below.

Me: So, just to remind you, I'm going in for surgery on Saturday. They're removing a gland from the side of my neck, so the recovery time will probably be three or four days.

Boss: Will you be back in the office on Monday?

Me: Probably not. Like I said--

Boss: --When will you be back?

Me: The recovery time is three or four days, so hopefully Tuesday or Wednesday.

Boss: Will you be taking any meetings on Monday?

Me: I will probably be bed-ridden, and I won't be able to speak.

Boss: That's not what I asked.

<comment><USER9> Not to nitpick, but a lot of people would appreciate clear, concise communication. Ideally, communication to your boss should have been:

"Just to remind you, I will be out next week until Thursday. I let the team know, and declined all the meetings scheduled"

all the other details are unnecessary. Let em know what they need to know, and take care of things that need addressed before you go out.

<comment><USER10> Maybe, but it's a little silly that they can't take a second to listen to what you said.

<comment><USER11> Bosses seem to hate being forced to reason out the answer, even if it should be readily apparent from what you said.

If you're annoyed and want to annoy them back, you can do the reasoning for them to point out how simple it is, e.g. "three days from now is Thursday" or "not being able to speak would make meetings useless, therefore I will not be able to take any."

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> _"Me: You've been invited to a meeting with 3 department heads to hash out their differences on Project 249.

Boss: I hate meetings."_

A couple of the boss responses listed here are totally reasonable and their head-scratch-inducing inclusion weakens the piece.

Meetings are a (sometimes) necessary evil, but I'm pretty skeptical of anyone who doesn't, at some level, hate them.

I mean, fuck, who wouldn't hate the idea of going to a meeting of 3 department heads to hash out differences? Sounds DREADFUL.

<comment><USER13> It's perfectly rational to hate meetings. But if you hate meetings, you should not be a Boss. In our business, part of the Boss job is going to meetings in order to protect your team from insanity.

If you hate something that is a core part of your job... This is a recipe for unhappiness. Now, I do not enjoy many of the meetings I attend. But I do enjoy some, and I get satisfaction out of doing the meeting part of my job well.

All that being said, I'm pretty sure I've said those exact words myself: "I hate meetings." So yeah, it's reasonable for a Boss to say those words. But not to believe them 24/7/365.

<comment><USER12> "But if you hate meetings, you should not be a Boss."

I disagree. If you cannot tolerate meetings to the point where you avoid them, you shouldn't be a boss. But if you hate meetings -- be a boss. Be _my_ boss. Because I want a boss that only calls me into meetings when it is absolultely necessary.

<comment><USER13> Oh, I hate dragging _you_ into meetings. That's why I go, and that's why I make sure that they are productive enough that we don't need to have ridiculous conference calls with ten people on each side that range from grand visionary pronouncements to discussing individual tickets with developers :-)

<comment><USER14> Ok, everyone and his dog hates meetings, am I the only one hating not being part of a meeting?

<comment><USER15> Hah...you only think like that until you're a part of _every_ meeting. That's really the issue. There are good meetings that I need to and should be a part of. Then there are the other 90% of my meetings that are a complete waste of my time.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> This quote from the OP hit home.

        Me:   The program was written with 3 SQL selects
        inside a loop. It ran OK when we had 500 parts.
        Now that we have 10,000 parts, it runs real slow.
        Boss: I don't understand.

I could say "true story" here... with a twist. Saying "I don't understand" is basic social engineering & management 101. The boss actually understood every single word and implication in that statement, he just wants to buy some time to decide silently on the best answer. Saying "I don't understand" puts the pressure on the dev who is lead to believe it's his fault and needs to think of a better description, maybe less technical and more to the point to express the problem. While the dev reformulates, the boss has finished thinking of an answer and can give it instantly. In the end, the dev has managed to express a problem with "simple" words, and the boss has proved he has great skills at solving problems once they are reported in the correct form.

I hated my boss when he did it to me, but I have to admit I used this in turn countless times when I became "the boss", to the point it's become a private joke in my former company, anyone saying "I don't understand", whatever their position, instantly got thrown balls or clips in their face.

<comment><USER17> Boss: I don't understand

Me: Call me when you do.

/me walks out

No, seriously-- I don't have time for this kind of bull. I'm not managing my boss, I'm working. And this gets in the way of working.

<comment><USER16> Well, as much as I agree with you from a personal perspective, I'm afraid it is part of your job to manage your boss, just like it's part of your job to build your team, build yourself, build your product, build your users and build your customers.

Anyway I walked out due to interlocutor stupidity exactly once:

        Random guy that one of ours helped (for free) a year
        before barges in and asks to talk to the manager,
        someone points him at me.
        Guy: I *demand* to talk to you about what someone from
        your team did last year. It's bad.
        Me: Sure, I'm not familiar with the story as I took
        charge only last month, and I'm in a pinch for some
        urgent business. Your thing looks urgent too, let's
        schedule an appointement at noon.
        Guy walks out mumbling to himself.

Noon - the following are EXACT QUOTES:

        Me : So how can we help?
        Guy : you guys did this last year. We can't use it.
        Me : what's the problem? Did something new come up?
        Guy : I think the problem is that whoever did this is
        incompetent.
        Me : woah, I didn't expect I'd have time for lunch
        today.
        /me walks out, goes to superior, tells story, the next
        day the guy in question gets shelved.

<comment><USER18> I don't understand... Besides failing to enunciate exactly what was wrong, what'd the guy do to earn the ire of you and your superiors?

<comment><USER16> "I don't understand", eh :P, well, allow me to expand then, my English level isn't good enough to get my point across in a couple sentences.

\- The guy barges in uninvited as if all hell broke loose and goes directly to the tech manager instead of passing through our customer service. Bad manners.

\- When I patiently and openly ask him about the nature of the issue, I expect a bug, a missing feature, an accident, something that I can fix. The only fix this guy has in mind is me firing my "incompetent" dev.

\- Labelling someone in my team as incompetent, without any names, means labelling me an incompetent, regardless of whether I was in charge back then. Helping him would be equivalent to taking the blame and would put me in a position of inferiority. Over something we basically did for free as a favor. One full year ago.

Best case scenario: for a full year he was in front of his product and raging over the dev's incompetence without telling anyone => incompetent product owner

Worst case scenario: something came up in the recent past which makes our product dangerously unfit under these new conditions. The best move at this point is to ask for improvements & fixes, workarounds or alternatives, or request through the chain of command to have us all replaced if it was really that bad. He simply ignored all that and thought he would solve the situation by barking baseless insults at my face => incompetent manager.

What the guy did was the professional equivalent of Trolling. I did what I usually do, I squelched him, sent a mail to firstname.lastname@example.com, told my system to filter him out, and moved on.

<comment><USER18> Oh. Thanks for explaining. That does seem quite unprofessional.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> Boss: _How long will it take for you to make the program? We're running low on other work._

Me: _30 seconds._

Boss: _That's too long. #### could have it done in... wait, what did you say?_

Me: _Well that sheds some light on your style of management._

<comment><USER20> i have to know - what was his reaction to being caught doing this?

<comment><USER19> There was a very long pause. He then found his words and asked how it was possible for me to finish a project (that would have normally taken 8 hours) in 30 seconds.

I had approached a previous similar project with a heavy focus on re- usability. The skeleton just needed XML added to customize it. And that could be added quicker than workers could get to that section requiring it. After that he actually asked why I had done that without permission.

Me: _Because you wouldn't have been able to understand it. And because of that you would have said no._

I have an innumerable number of examples from this guy. I could start my own PHB cartoon. He kept his job because loyalty is often more valued than competence. (And in his case loyalty meant routinely fudging timesheets and not paying the grunt workers their full pay.)

I had transferred from a satellite branch to the main branch. I stayed a year under this doofus out of loyalty to the manager from the satellite branch who had recommended me. I quit at exactly 1 year. Contracted for them for 4 more months and oh was I glad to be gone.

Several months after I left I made some friends who used to have the doofus in their social group. He was ostracized and no longer welcome because he had stolen money from coats and purses piled onto a bed at a get-together.

I was also responsible for training my two replacements. I recommended that they not keep one of them. They did. After I had left this other guy managed to do a "rm -rf" on the primary SCO UNIX server that dispatched work to everyone. He also managed to improperly rebuild a RAID array on a W2k3 server and wipe everything. He also...

Wait. I feel the PTSD kicking in. Needless to say, it was a very dysfunctional work environment.

<comment><USER21> Sounds like you should've said eight hours, delivered in four, and spent all but 30 seconds of that polishing your resume.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> Hang on a sec.

Not liking mornings or meetings.

Or forgetting what you'd prioritized someone to do.

Or being spam CCed by 'useful' emails.

I think when you look at a lot of these from the boss perspective and change the words slightly, they're totally normal human responses.

<comment><USER23> Except that these are normal aspects of their job. Not liking the sight of blood is a normal human response too, but shouldn't be if your career choice is butcher or surgeon.

<comment><USER24> Yeah, I know a lot of these hit close to home, but on the emails - you've never been a boss.

1 - Get 1300 emails a day (not an exaggeration) - 8 am

2 - Get 50 emails from executives who basically want to fire you OR someone who works for you and you have to act fast to stop the bleeding. - 10 am

3 - Get another 400 emails that are related to an ongoing discussion with managers on your level who are trying to stick your department with more work/blame/responsibility without letting you in on it. React at lightning speed to ward off evil. 2 pm.

4 - Attend many, many meetings in which executives will try to blame you, other managers will try to blame other managers, and long, tedious initiatives are discussed in hushed tones. Fight urge to nod off/strangle people/demand clarity. Pay attention because in six months one of these hapless bastards will claim everyone agreed to something preposterous in the meeting. - <USER2> place: Every available minute. Including lunch, because "that was the only time everyone had available for some reason."

5 - Developer says he CC'd you on several emails related to the XYZ system and is baffled as to why you aren't completely up to date. Don't tell him that at 10 am the CEO was demanding he be fired (from a cannon). 6 pm.

<comment><USER25> Hmm, while I agree that it can be hard to keep on top of you emails in that kind of volume, if you're a boss, and you're bothered enough about being kept up to date on a project, perhaps some email rules that filter emails about that project into a seperate folder so you can see, quite easily that there are emails about that project, might be a good idea?

I occasionally get similair situations to this at work, which is why I request read receipts. Makes it even more satisfying when an account manager is having a go at you for not emailing them something and you point out they sent you a read receipt for it, they just obviously didn't actually read it. My account managers hate my read receipts :)

<comment><USER26> What you don't get here (and he didn't really spell it out because I guess it seems obvious once you're in that position) is you don't have time to (nor should you even want to) follow every email thread about every project that you (should, theoretically) already have complete faith that your employee is successfully executing. If you need an update, you just want an update (hey I noticed Bill's getting a little antsy, here's the status of project 127: "status") not to find and trace back through a discussion of x y and z aspects of implementation or marketing or whatever.

<comment><USER24> Bingo - you have to trust that the people working for you know what they are doing. This means going to meetings and being belligerent with other managers at times as they try to claim your people are screwing everything up, without even checking with your people. You always defend first, never call anyone out by name and never let any other manager talk derogatorily about your employees. Part of your job is to protect the people who aren't there to defend themselves.

This also means that if your developers drop the ball, you're screwed. You can't possibly know if someone is sticking bugs in the code as they race for a deadline, but when the system misses deadline because of it, guess who's responsible?

Doesn't help when you stick up for a dev for weeks or months and then they burn you by introducing shoddy code or not testing thoroughly, and their response is 'well I sent you a bunch of read receipt emails, so those browser bugs I introduced aren't my fault - you should be paying attention'.

This experience is why I work so hard to back up my boss or lead when I'm just a developer on a project.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> This really happened to me in the last month. I was contracted with a company that has a contract to build a company for a bigger client with customers.

PM: We need you to fix a bug. One of our client's customers couldn't complete the form. Me: What error did they get? PM: I don't know, but it's very important we fix this. Me: Do we have steps to reproduce it? PM: No, can't you just fix it? Me: Did they retry the submission process? PM: I don't know. Me: Does it happen often? PM: Just this one customer as far as we know. Me: Well, do we at least know when it happened so I can find it in the logs? PM: Sometime last week. Look, this is really important to the client, can you just make this top priority? We want it fixed ASAP.

The "bug" has not been fixed because the devs still don't even know what the error is. We had another high-priority bug shortly before this because the client didn't understand that something wasn't allowed according to the access rules in the spec they (theoretically) helped write.

<comment><USER28> I'm not calling you a liar, but I'm skeptical about stories like this. I can't even fathom any scenario in which someone more intelligent than a cucumber could behave in this manner. How does this PM manage to get and maintain any job at all, let alone one that requires the ability to understand software development process and constraints?

<comment><USER11> It wasn't a PM or anyone technical, but I can confirm that people of "cucumber" intelligence do, in fact, exist in management and that I have personally met them and been ready to tear my hear out during exchanges like:

"We had an error!" "What error?" "Who cares? Fix it!"

In an unrelated note, I think I'm going to start calling such useless reports cucumbers.

<comment><USER29> Just once, I'd like to respond to that with, "OK, give me the bug number and I'll fix it right now by marking it resolved."

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> Boss (via email): Email me the results as soon as this thing is finished.

Me (replying to email within less than a minute): It's already done. Here you go.

        [Hours pass.]

Boss (via telephone): You're still not done with this?

Me: I finished hours ago. I replied to your email right away.

Boss: Oh, I didn't read your response. I thought the results would come via a separate email with a different subject line.

Me: ...

<comment><USER31> Headdesk moments like these can be irritating, but if you pay attention when your boss says stuff like this and learn to communicate with them on their terms (e.g. communicating through subject lines where possible for this boss) you will see a world of difference in the ease and efficacy of interacting with them.

</comment></comment><comment><USER32>
      One month ago:

      me: Hey, everything is alright with project X?
      boss: Yep, perfect.

      Next monday, employee call me.
      employee: Can you walk me through the code.
      * me explains everything*
      employee: Ok, just to let you know you are fire.
      me: :-/ Why?
      employee: Boss will call you
      me: ok

      next day, boss don't call
      I write an e-mail
      No answer
      Another email 6-7 hours later
      Boss: Sorry, I'm really busy. Calling you tomorrow

      *Tomorrow*
      no call
      *next day, for a week*
      no call.

      I go to the office to talk to him.
      boss: I have a meeting, I have to run. I'll call you when I get back.

      And he still haven't call me back, and I have no idea why I got fired.

<comment><USER33> Your name isn't Buttle is it?

<comment><USER32> I don't know if it was a joke I didn't understand, but no my name isn't Buttle..

<comment><USER34> It's from Brazil: <http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0088846/>

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER35> Me: This vendor software you purchased is not going to scale well on EC2, it needs physical hardware to work well. Boss: Well, we don't have time to go purchase physical hardware and get it racked. That'll take 3 months.

...3 months later...

Boss: This stuff isn't scaling, we need to all come in over the weekend to work out the kinks with the production servers. Me: Purchase some hardware and get it racked. EC2 just isn't working out. Boss: I can't. I already sold our executive team on the cloud and we don't have room in our budget for hardware.

...Another 3 months go by... Boss is gone.

<comment><USER36> A lot of places rent out physical hardware, meaning you won't have to buy it. It might take more time if you have specific needs, but some providers can deploy hardware in minutes.

<comment><USER35> Agreed. I knew his 3 months excuse was a straw man argument but I wasn't in IT so I couldn't argue against it.

The truth came out only after another 3 months of failed scaling when we found out that he'd oversold the benefits of cloud based scaling to the nontechnical leadership.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER37>
        Boss: You did great this year. I'm giving you a 2% increase.
        Me:   I hate you. I quit.
        Boss: Then I'll give you a 4% increase.
        Me:   I still hate you. I still quit.

Had the same situation years ago - fought tooth and nail to even get a review - by the time they gave me one I was accepting a position elsewhere and the 2% they offered was a joke.

<comment><USER38> It's exceedingly rare to get a huge raise just for doing the job you were hired for. The best place to demand dollars is in the interview. Inside a company your best bet is to clearly delinate role changes, and make your demands parallel to that change. Don't ever fall for the "do the higher level work now, get the raise later".

<comment><USER39> Really? I have had 3 jobs in my 7 year career as a developer. In each job, I have always given 110%, solved every problem given to me, and been 'the guy' who can fix things quickly when they break. I'm a PHP developer by trade, recently our iPhone developer quit. I learnt Objective C in 2 weeks and am now maintaining two large iPhone apps as well as doing my PHP duties as a senior dev.

I have never asked for a raise, in my first job I started on 30k and was on 80k in 1 year (new zealand dollars). In my second job I started on 40k pounds and was on 50k in 6 months. In my current job (been here 3 months) I'm looking at a 20% pay increase in the next month.

Never asked for a raise. I just shine and get the karma back.

<comment><USER37> Your experience will vary from company to company - while my initial post mentioned the company that I had to fight to get a review at, I later on worked at a company for over 4 years where I was given a yearly raise that exceeded the percentage cap that was in place - I was appreciated and they made sure to show me. Every company and every boss is different - it's great when you work for the good places.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER40> "Foreign keys don't buy you anything - I leave them out. If we program right, we'll never have inconsistent data anyway."

"Superclasses don't buy you anything - you should just copy the code everywhere that might need it."

"Unit tests are nice, but we should be able to write code that works and not need to rely on tests to tell us that."

No, I'm not there anymore.

<comment><USER41> I keep running into DBAs and data architects that keep trying the "we don't need foreign keys" argument. I always ensure they lose that argument (and stuff gets better, amazing!).

Though in all seriousness, what alternate universe are these people crawling out of?

That and the types who call their j-random database a "data warehouse".

<comment><USER40> This guy's experience was almost entirely with front-end technology (pretty much just JSP's actually), and it showed in almost every engineering decision he made. The sad thing is that, there is an argument to be made for denormalizing data and not using foreign keys. That argument is not "they don't buy you anything."

<comment><USER17> I worked in a bank for a minute or three. Big one. The production databases ran without foreign key constraints enabled for performance. In the development environment, however, all constraints were strictly enforced.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER42> Boss: "This new feature is similar to one that's already in another program, so you can just copy that code. You can do that in a couple of hours, right?"

Me (coining a metaphor): "The fuel distributor in a Pratt & Whitney Turbojet engine will not work in a Norelco Electric Shaver, even though both can be used to cut grass."

When you combine gross underestimation of effort with the re-prioritization cycle, you get a monster that probably destroys millions of hours of productivity every year around the world. As soon as it becomes clear that the project won't get done as early as expected, the boss re-assigns you to a new priority. What would have taken 4 weeks to do 3 projects now takes 4 months and only results in the completion of one.

</comment><comment><USER43> My favorite. Back in the mid-90s I consulted on a Lotus Notes project at a major company. We built a prototype and started showing it various VPs who would be using it.

One of the VPs was really terribly with a mouse. The tutorial was as much about the basics of navigating a GUI as the application itself.

Afterwards I asked the project manager "What does that guy do? He doesn't seem to know anything about computers."

"He's the VP of Technology." (!)

</comment><comment><USER44> "You're just doing X, how can that take Y days?!"

Where X is something seemingly simple. What makes it more frustrating is that it is often very difficult to precisely describe _why_ it is that X involves so much unintuitive complexity.

Also

"The users don't care about how it's developed"

Except that code quality defines the readability, maintainability, and often- times performance (deeply coupled code can make optimisations very difficult, for example) of an application both _during_ development and afterwards.

</comment><comment><USER45> The best compliment I got from a boss once:

"Normally, fuck-ups like this take three guys a week to fix. One guy fixed your fuck-up in two hours. You don't fuck-up as well as most."

<comment><USER46> "One smart man mistake, another smart man can fix. One idiot's mistake, 20 smart men cannot fix."

</comment></comment><comment><USER47> On 99% of the projects I've been involved with:

Boss: So you can do <anything> in two weeks then?

Me: No, what I just talked about is a multi-month endeavor.

The reasoning behind this is probably formed from a multitude of influences. Executive desire, manager's attempts to look good, and a complete lack of comprehension of what building software is about all rank high on the list. The one I, for the life of me, cannot understand is why programmers insist on pushing the "I can hack that together in 48 hours" mythology. Surely it has had an effect on the management psyche and influenced the mental math used to conclude that the maximum time it should take any feature to be developed is fourteen days.

</comment><comment><USER48> I wonder why 'famous last words':

\- Did someone fire the boss for those? \- Did you quit your job and started a new one?

imho, famous last words should sound like: "I will not leave it nor depart it until I am buried in the ground." (rough translation) Mubarak 10th of Feb on TV.

PS: The most famous last word to quit a job in Germany is: "Ich habe fertig", you should note the wrong grammar here.

</comment><comment><USER49> Monday : Ticket 453 is your top priority, fix it asap.

Tuesday : Ticket 923 is your new top priority, fix it asap.

Wenesday : Client xyz needs ticket 1921 to be resolved, this is your new top priority, fix it asap.

Thursday : ...

You get the pattern. Running around with duck tape makes awesome products in the long run

</comment><comment><USER50> Here's one. I ended up hating this place. I stuck around way too long.

Jim: We need to be first search result on Google by Monday.

Me: It doesn't really work like that. We can buy ads on google though.

Jim: No I don't want to spend any money. What do we need to do to get to the top of google by Monday?

Me: Well we can implementing some of the SEO improvements we have been suggesting for the last year. But we won't get to the top of Google by Monday.

Jim: We need to be first search result on Google by Monday. What do we have to do to be the first result on Google by Monday?

....

Conversation repeats its self 3 times, while I patiently explain how google works.

...

Me: You really have to stop asking that question, it doesn't work like that.

Business Partner: NO! WE NEED TO BE AT THE TOP OF GOOGLE BY MONDAY!

I was a partner at this place. I left after many repeats of similar discussions.

Oh god this place gave me nose bleeds. I have to stop thinking about it now.

</comment><comment><USER51> Boss: Do you know excel? I need to make this graph look better

Me: Okay, what do you wanna change?

Boss: Well I want them to show things going up, especially towards the end so it shows us really growing to the VCs

Me: How is that possible?

Boss: It's definitely possible. I just don't know Excel.

<comment><USER4> As a financial consultant, I get a lot of graphs with downright preposterous aspect ratios on a weekly basis.

</comment></comment><comment><USER52> My own "never have I been so glad to leave a job" story:

Me: I think it's time for me to move on. To be quite honest, I see no potential for advancement here and I'm being expected to work dozens of hours of unpaid overtime each month. As we've discussed previously, my hourly rate is already low compared to industry standards and my experience level, and you've told me that the funds simply aren't available to rectify that. I sympathize with your position, and I wish everyone here nothing but the best, but that still doesn't change the fact that this job simply isn't paying well enough to cover my expenses.

Boss: I wish I could talk you out of it, but if that's really what you want to do, I can't stop you... but honestly, I don't think you're good enough to make it anywhere else.

<comment><USER53> Noticed you both have to point out when you're being honest, as though the default is dishonesty. Must have been quite a culture of misrepresentation.

<comment><USER52> It was my first job out of college. I was, however, a fair bit older when I graduated and did have a few years of experience freelancing, but this was my first time working in a corporate environment.

The whole company culture was one of distrust. We would be told in meetings, for example, that the we were to lie to the sales team about product details and were regularly encouraged to infringe on copyrights when doing design work.

The ethics were a huge part of why I left the company as well, but it wasn't a battle I was going to win. I'd tried before and failed, so at that point, I just didn't bring it up.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER54> This was one of many reasons why I had to quit my last job:

ME: According to the newsletter stats, more people have opted out than actually clicked on any links last week.

BOSS: We need to increase subscribers to the newsletter.

<comment><USER55> At my last company (I quit a little over a year ago), we had a newsletter with a nice opt-in system setup (I set it up during my time there). 5000 active users I think and 30,000 users that had opted-out.

Well, at one of my last meetings, my boss yelled at me and told me that we were "leaving money on the table" by not sending emails to the opt-out list.

I explained to him exactly why it was a bad idea to email these people, but he didn't want to listen. Within a day we were permanently banned from our email provider.

My boss wanted to sue the mail provider for "disrupting our service". I've had so many terrible bosses that don't know how to run a proper business, I wonder how they make any money in the first place.

<comment><USER46> Man, with a boss funny as this one, I would have never left the job.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER56> Some of these are like Yogi Berra's sayings - they're both stupid and brilliant at the same time. Compare

""You give 100 percent in the first half of the game, and f that isn't enough in the second half you give what's left."

with

"No, I meant, 'How do we fix this with software?'"

</comment><comment><USER57> Cute. But unless a boss describes himself as technically capable, why should I expect him to understand about 3 SELECT statements inside a loop?

<comment><USER40> That's a fair point, but I'd still expect anyone to understand the part about how it ran fine under a test load, but now runs very slowly under a much larger load.

</comment></comment><comment><USER58> Boss: We have too many customer support calls. Can you work on fixing the open tickets so that these issues go away.

Me: Sure thing.

Boss (2 hrs later): Why aren't you answering the phone for our customer support calls!?

</comment><comment><USER59> Are you sure you didn't just transcribe some back-issues of Dilbert?

<comment><USER60> I've read a few of Scott Adams' books, and he's mentioned that he has intentionally tried to put some absolutely ridiculous scenarios in his comics that could never happen... only to have readers e-mailing him and asking if he'd worked at Company X, because the exact thing had happened to them.

</comment></comment><comment><USER61> Do you really work at a place where everything is so impersonable that it is all referenced by project number or was that used to obfuscate your clients in this example?

None of the comments surprise me to be honest, I find that managers have come from no background to instruct people on a technological level and are taken on for simply their management ability.

<comment><USER62> Referencing things by number is pretty common, I think, a lot of places use a Jira system where each ticket has a number and its often used for all development related tasks.

<comment><USER61> Our projects do carry a reference, it is usually prefixed by the department handling it and a number but when we have production meetings they are all referenced by the client and the job in hand.

I don't think I would like to work at a company where it was just a number, I like it being personal, it would feel more like a machine with just numbers or references

<comment><USER62> yeah, I agree its a bit weird, at the company I work for people usually just resort to describing the issue when talking about it (when not in front of a computer), rather than reference the number, but jira ticket numbers are frequently passed back and worth to refer to specific tasks.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER63> Humorous, however the following is actually a semi pet peeve of mine :

Boss: I'm really upset that no one has updated me on Project 127. Me: I cc'd you on all 9 Project 127 emails I sent this week. Boss: I haven't had time to get caught up on my email.

Depending on the scale and structure of the company / department, getting "caught up on emails" can range from "completely reasonable" to "fundamentally impossible".

For example, at a previous job we received no less than 250 work emails daily and often more. Needless to say, simply being CC'd was not a guarantee the recipient would be up to speed on the contents of said email string.

<comment><USER64> But would you complain that no-one's given you an update? There are better ways to get status updates than pointing fingers.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> Recently...

Mgmt: We need to replace this system ASAP! Me: What does it do? Mgmt: We don't know. Me: Who knows? Mgmt: Maybe this girl. Girl: I'm too busy to talk, but make sure nothing breaks.

I did end up writing a replacement system. What I found out was all the people who were 'too busy' to talk or email me back with information suddenly responded when I took down their part of the system as I worked to replace it. I've never had to do a worse project and I'm happy it's over.

</comment><comment><USER65> You get to the point when you no longer believe a word of what they say.

And then you quit.

</comment><comment><USER66> I'm impressed that there are places that have 432 projects ...

<comment><USER42> One of them mentions a shutdown from Amazon because they ship too many orders late. That rang lots of bells for me, because it sounds like IT at an independent fulfillment company, which will usually have its own web store and sell through many other companies besides Amazon.

432 projects are a lot to you? Imagine your boss is someone who reacts to every business challenge and opportunity by creating a new project. Imagine that every vendor you ship for has re-invented EDI, without ever having heard of EDI, and it was designed by one of:

A) Someone they found on Craigslist

B) A kid they hired who doesn't comprehend how you can write a program without wrapping it between <% and %> and loading it in a browser

C) A guy who thinks he's a programmer because he once wrote an Excel macro

Their mechanisms can be so bizarre that you can't really support them by configuring an existing fetch-n-post, or Extract-Transform-Load system. You just have to fire up Visual Studio and write Project 433, AKA "Overstock.com Is Tripping On Acid And Now Requires That We Convey Order Status Via Modulated Carrier Pigeons".

Some of the weirdest I've been asked to support:

* Moving the order file between different subdirectories on their FTP server to convey status (ie: we log into their FTP site and issue a MOVE command on the file to put it in the /shipped folder). Did I mention that each file contains multiple orders?

* We have to implement a SOAP API to _their_ spec and expose it on the public internet for them to call at-will to send orders and query for status.

* CSV wrapped in XML, but it's CSV with a sub-delimiter because one of the columns has to be treated like an array to convey the status of each line-item.

* Orders that come in an Excel file, but they never order or name the columns consistently from file-to-file.

And that's just for fulfillment services.

<comment><USER67> Oh joy. Sounds like dealing with telco billing. On one side you get excel tariff files which change in random ways every month, on the other you get silly billing data. Can you imagine ITSP getting an itemised bill for a month of calls from upstream provider? I think it was 3 rather large boxes filled with printouts. Still not sure why that happened.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> i can really empathise with the "start the year off right" commenter - my last boss (ceo of the company) once insisted on several long phone conferences during the christmas break, so we could "hit the ground running" when we returned. he was a firm believer in permanent-crisis mode.

</comment><comment><USER68> Is it me or has this guy quit from an awful lot of jobs? I'm not sure I'd hire someone so transient.

</comment><comment><USER69> Pretty funny list, but this seems like a case of poor management of expectations. It shouldn't be your job to explain why things matter (as in 'Boss: What difference does that make?'), but sometimes that's reality.

Here's a set of slides on taking control of poor communication situations and learning to efficiently keep managers in the feedback loop. Sometimes it doesn't work out ('Boss: I haven't had time to get caught up on my email.'), though it's certainly a start.

[http://www.fs.cornell.edu/PMT/Communications/Managing%20Expe...](http://www.fs.cornell.edu/PMT/Communications/Managing%20Expectations.pdf)

</comment><comment><USER70> One Sunday I got a call from a help desk guy involving an application I had worked on. This was the first call I had ever gotten about this app. I am pretty sure I was last on the contact list PM calls me 10 minutes later and says we need to discuss my level of commitment, Says I have been shirking my duty and letting everyone else handle support. All I could say is that it was the first call I had ever gotten, maybe bump me up on the call list. He didn't know there was a call list they followed in sequence, still I should have been doing more.

I made sure this guy never PMed me again.

</comment><comment><USER45> I had a boss once who thought IPv6 had something to do with car engines. I kid you not.

</comment><comment><USER71> At first I thought these were last words by bosses that died afterwards

</comment><comment><USER72> "You're Fired"

that one is pretty famous

</comment><comment><USER73> You work for the government don't you?

</comment><comment><USER74> A bunch of babies. Start your own company then.

<comment><USER60> "You had a bad experience with a doctor? Just go to med school and open your own practice."

</comment></comment><comment><USER75> _Me: The server crashed. IT Services is working to bring it back up._

 _Boss: Don't confuse me with all these technical details._

I bet your boss among those deciding on SOPA.

<comment><USER75> If my comment is not relevant, then why is this post at the top of HN?

It is my understanding that the post depicts the irony that those who do not understand are put in charge.

I should not be explaining my comment, but downvoting without a counter argument makes no sense to me. It is the equivalent of responding to an argument or statement with "I don't agree"

Though not a big deal, annoying all the same.

<comment><USER76> #1. It's unlikely that the boss is deciding on SOPA. #2. Your comment does not contain any particular insight on SOPA or shitty bosses. It's just a repetition of the meme about SOPA. SOPA awareness is important, but you have not contributed to it. #3. As a joke, your comment is not particularly funny.

<comment><USER75> "#1. It's unlikely that the boss is deciding on SOPA"

It is sad people cannot sense humor except a lol or :) is appended to it.

"#2. Your comment does not contain any particular insight on

SOPA or shitty bosses. It's just a repetition of the meme about SOPA. SOPA awareness is important, but you have not contributed to it."

I have previously commented on SOPA and it was actually the top comment. <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3251471> . So I fully understand the implications of SOPA.

I did not read it as a take on "shitty bosses" but as someone reporting to who had no idea about what he was supposed to be in charge of.

". As a joke, your comment is not particularly funny."

A very subjective statement.

Thanks for taking time to reply. I still reiterate that downvotes in a discussion forum serves little purpose. If a statement is offensive, flag it. Don't downvote into oblivion and try to censor anything that goes contrary to "the official position".</comment></comment></comment></comment>


The Silicon Factor (1980) [video] - <AUTHOR> https://clp.bbcrewind.co.uk/cd93f5ddfdc398b0c62e9e2456e0124a <comment><USER3> The link to the website was posted recently [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22683158](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22683158) . Reposting my earlier comment on it [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22695866](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22695866) :

> This wave of computer-literacy programming was actually started by a series > from the BBC's commercially-funded rival ITV, Christoper Evans' _The Mighty > Micro_. [http://www.retro-now.com/the-mighty-micro-itvs-forgotten- > com...](http://www.retro-now.com/the-mighty-micro-itvs-forgotten-computer- > program) (Wayback: > [https://web.archive.org/web/20191224064630/http://www.retro-...](https://web.archive.org/web/20191224064630/http://www.retro- > now.com/the-mighty-micro-itvs-forgotten-computer-program/)) > [https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLqrLFTwrYemNYgb- > hPXd3...](https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLqrLFTwrYemNYgb- > hPXd3Kiwe0L8vuyIr) (Evans also appears as a guest in the CLP's _The Silicon > Factor_. > [https://clp.bbcrewind.co.uk/b5047fb21312089c95fdf482cda3c697](https://clp.bbcrewind.co.uk/b5047fb21312089c95fdf482cda3c697))

> I wonder if anyone has chased down people who remember Dick Brodner's > circa-1980 home-automation setup in his Chicago house > [https://clp.bbcrewind.co.uk/e0417b82d1c1a84345852bf21916073e](https://clp.bbcrewind.co.uk/e0417b82d1c1a84345852bf21916073e) > , or found out what became of it or if anything remains of it?

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks. Posted as although I was around at the time I wasn't really particularly aware that any chip manufacturing was going on in the UK - <USER2> the possible exception of Ferranti who did the Spectrum ULA.

I think INMOS did quite a bit of manufacturing later but not aware of any left in the UK now.

</comment></comment><comment> the-dude "The media could not be loaded, either because the server or network failed or because the format is not supported."

<comment><USER4> Make sure you're not blocking cookies - if you have cookies blocked, you'll get that error.

(Not that I agree that you should need to allow cookies to watch a video, but that seems to be the reality of the internet right now).</comment></comment>


Microsoft releases its first-ever iPhone application - <AUTHOR> http://www.infoworld.com/article/08/12/15/Microsoft_releases_its_firstever_iPhone_application-IDGNS_1.html

<comment><USER2> I'm really impressed with Seadragon on the iPhone. It's quite slick and feels a bit like the right kind of platform for Seadragon.</comment>


Mapping brain activity at scale with cluster computing [pdf] - <AUTHOR> http://www.janelia.org/sites/default/files/biblio/field_related_file/nmeth.3041.pdf

<comment><AUTHOR> Using optical microscopy, Apache Spark, and a new set of open source analysis tools for deconvoluting neural activity related to behavior. See more on the new analysis toolkit (currently available in Python) at [http://research.janelia.org/zebrafish/index.html](http://research.janelia.org/zebrafish/index.html) Not my work, but it seems like a great application of "big data" tools to biology!</comment>


When machine learning matters - <AUTHOR> https://erikbern.com/2016/08/05/when-machine-learning-matters.html <comment><USER2> I think the interesting observation is: if you are using ML chances are 80% of your algorithms are already published somewhere and available to all, so one should tune in that 20% of his/her own field, some field which is not a common research topic. I also think that a huge difference, once you have the same algorithmic machine, is the quality of data you collect. That is also quite differentiating, I mean, respect to your own business problem, gathering data a way or the other may really destroy or boost your ML performances.</comment>


Economics Has a Math Problem - <AUTHOR> http://www.bloombergview.com/articles/2015-09-01/economics-has-a-math-problem <comment><USER2> I was always interested in both Physics and Economics and did studies in both disciplines.

As a physicist, the models that I encountered in economic theory always left me quite disappointed. The main reason for this was that -like the article says- most of the models used in Economics are based on abstract reasoning about "ideal" markets and actors (or more recently on game-theoretic ideas) instead of experimental data. One reason for this is of course that when many of those models were developed (in the 50s or earlier) there simply was no reliable (micro-)data available that one could develop a theory against. Another big problem that kept Economics from taking a more experimental stance towards model generation is of course that until recently it was very hard or outright impossible to conduct large-scale experiments, which are the main instrument to validate (or better, not falsify) a given theory in other disciplines such as Physics or Biology.

That said, the recent computerization of all aspects of business and the creation of virtual economies -like Eve Online, World of Warcraft- and "transparent" markets -like Bitcoin- should provide ample data to develop "real" models of economic behavior against, and I think that many researchers actually already make use of this data.

The theories that will result from this will probably be more like those developed in statistical mechanics though -i.e. making statements about the aggregate behavior of the system- rather than those developed e.g. in electrodynamics, where we usually can predict the behavior of even a single particle. Would love -and be at bit scared- to be proved wrong about this of course :)

<comment><USER3> Great comment. Incidentally, have you come across Deirdre Mccloskey, I've been reading her book 'Bourgeois Dignity: Why Economics Can't Explain the Modern World' and finding it really interesting. Economics is a social science, taking measurements / accumulating data and theorising on that data causes changes in behaviour. Just sitting around talking about economics, or your weekly budget, drives changes in behaviour.

As a layperson with a bit of an interest in economics I don't really see how, as the article says "econ is now a rogue branch of applied math". More like economics uses applied maths, or something like that. It's a 'social science', we can't reveal the laws (let's call them 'habits') of economics like we do The Laws of Nature, because circumstances change -both globally and locally (macro / micro)- and new economic phenomenon emerge.

It'd be interesting to see what future historians have to say about present day economics.

<comment><USER4> > Economics is a social science, taking measurements / accumulating data and > theorising on that data causes changes in behaviour. Just sitting around > talking about economics, or your weekly budget, drives changes in behaviour.

Funny - you could say the same about physics. For example, knowing that the coming car may kill a person causes the human behaviour to change, namely the driver will stop the car. Does that invalidate Newton's laws?

Yes we probably cannot predict universe totally. But we can do scenarios (of complex emergent systems of interacting agents with bounded rationality), just like in physics. In fact the whole point of doing that analysis is to change behaviour of people, one way or another.

<comment><USER5> > Funny - you could say the same about physics. For example, knowing that the > coming car may kill a person causes the human behaviour to change, namely > the driver will stop the car. Does that invalidate Newton's laws?

The difference is that whether a person will try to move out of the way of an oncoming car is _not_ considered within the domain of physics (so them using their knowledge of physics to predict that a car is a danger may change their behavior, but not the accuracy of what physics predicts within its domain), but whether or not a person will try to move their money out of the path of a predicted stock market collapse _is_ within the domain of economics.

This doesn't actually make empiricism any less applicable to economics, but it does compound problems in the empirical study of economics.

<comment><USER4> No, it's an artificial distinction (or perhaps better would be to say, there is an artificial distinction where you decided that physics is not a social science). In both cases, you can analyze two scenarios:

1\. Car continues and hits the person / investor won't move money out before stock market crashes

2\. Car is stopped / investor will move the money out

In both cases, the physics or economics is no less applicable whatever the circumstances of the actual decision. And just like physics cannot tell you whether the car stops, economics cannot tell you whether investors will actually move the money out. But what economics can tell you, under certain assumptions, say, investors want to make money with this and this horizon, whether or not are they likely to move out.

Let me give another example. Water flows downhill due to gravity. Yet, people can decide to build water pump and aqueduct to get water uphill. In doing so, they didn't break any physical laws. But if you ignore the pump, it may seem that the water flow downhill anymore and so the laws are incorrect. What happened is that now our model of the situation should include the pump, and within the expanded model, physical laws are again preserved.

Similarly for instance, if the society decides to regulate markets, the behaviour of the people can be changed, but they don't necessarily have to break some universal economic law. The new behaviour can have a perfect economic explanation, it's just that the frame of the model changed.

It seems that this "infinite regress" confusion (also called Lucas critique, if I am not mistaken) is caused by ignoring the fact that every model of reality only includes a portion of it and is never a perfect description (for example we ignore the physics of human brain when we model the car hitting the pedestrian).

Also, you should note there are situations where knowing more doesn't actually change the behaviour (under assumption of certain rationality) - for example, getting to know the exact odds of casino wins won't entice me to play.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> There are several problems with social sciences not just economics. Recently, I've read an interview by Yanis Varoufakis[1]. Here's an interesting excerpt:

\---

 _Mariana Mazzucato, University of Sussex – How has the crisis in Greece (its cause and its effects) revealed failings of neoclassical economic theory at both the micro and the macro level?_

 _Varoufakis_ : The uninitiated may be startled to hear that the macroeconomic models taught at the best universities feature no accumulated debt, no involuntary unemployment and, indeed, no money (with relative prices reflecting a form of barter). Save perhaps for a few random shocks that demand and supply are assumed to quickly iron out, the snazziest models taught to the brightest of students assume that savings automatically turn into productive investment, leaving no room for crises.

It makes it hard when these graduates come face-to-face with reality. They are at a loss, for example, when they see German savings that permanently outweigh German investment while Greek investment outweighs savings during the "good times" (before 2008) but collapses to zero during the crisis.

Moving to the micro level, the observation that, in the case of Greece, real wages fell by 40% but employment dropped precipitously, while exports remained flat, illustrates in Technicolor how useless a microeconomics approach bereft of macro foundations truly is.

\----

I really don't know at what level of complexity someone must settle, in order to have a viable mathematical model to predict financial crisis... How many variables do you need? Then again a lot in economics depends on 'perception'. A FinMin will never discuss devaluation of his currency, the moment he does... The currency will drop. How can a mathematical model 'predict' such behaviours?

[1] [https://theconversation.com/varoufakis-in-conversation- with-...](https://theconversation.com/varoufakis-in-conversation-with-leading- academics-as-syriza-splinters-and-election-beckons-in-greece-35861)

<comment><USER7> This interview is almost incoherent.

Note the contradiction: "no involuntary unemployment and, indeed, no money" followed by "real wages fell by 40% but employment dropped".

The latter statement only contradicts Keynesian economics, which don't have relative prices (Keynesian economics has only real and nominal dollars of GDP) and uses money combined with sticky prices to explain involuntary unemployment.

But although in one sentence he seems to think the Greek experience contradicts Keynesian economics, he turns around and appeals to Keynesian economics a few minutes later: "the 3.5% primary target for 2018 would depress growth today".

<comment><USER8> Actually, Keynes called his book _General Theory_ precisely because it included unemployment, in the context of Keynesian economics usually called the output gap. So "no involuntary unemployment and, indeed, no money" is a insult from a Keynesian against neo-classic models.

Second, "real wages fell by 40% but employment dropped," this is precisely what a Keynesian expects. The core insight of Keynesian economics is, that the employees are also the consumers, so that falling prices lead to falling demand.

<comment><USER7> No, Keynesian economics proposes that high real wages are what cause unemployment - if an employee's real output drops but his real wage stays flat, he might become unprofitable to employ. Since nominal wages are the real sticky quantity, Keynesians propose inflation as a sneaky way to reduce the employee's real wages.

<comment><USER8> Usually Keynsian economics is understood as economic thought that is based on aggregate demand, this is for example the view Wikipedia takes. [1] From there it is straightforward to argue that higher wages lead to higher employment, a view that makes Keynsian economics popular on the left.

The view, that too high wages cause unemployment, is a staple of supply side economics, the view that the economic process is driven by the supply side.

Krugman argues a lot about sticky wages recently, but not because this is a central tenet of Keneysian economics. Krugmann argues about sticky wages because it is a good argument against the troika's handling of the Greek crisis, since the internal adjustment in the Euro area would either mean inflation in Germany or deflation in Greece.

[1] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Keynesian_economics](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Keynesian_economics)

<comment><USER7> Did you read the article on wikipedia? Start from the heading "Concept".

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Keynesian_economics#Concept](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Keynesian_economics#Concept)

Supply side economics is not based on wage levels at all, but rather based on tax-based disincentives to employment and investment.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Supply- side_economics](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Supply-side_economics)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Economics has an honesty problem. Financially motivated obfuscation is a problem in other sciences: global warming denialism, sponsored studies claiming that cigarettes aren't carcinogenic, all manner of food health and safety claims, and so on. Generally the evidence is overwhelmingly against them and the battle is mostly over PR and communicating to the public.

Economics is different; arguments that are very convenient to people who are wealthy under the status quo are very difficult to challenge, resulting in failed austerity programmes, "trickle down", and so on.

<comment><USER10> I partially agree with this view; however, to be fair, this is not a problem with academic economics, but rather with "pop economics".

There is no lack of academic economists who can (and do) prove how austerity programs and trickle-down are wrong; in fact, they're the only ones really leading the charge on this matter in the political world at the moment.

The problem is that policy leaders not trained in advanced economic studies (most of them lawyers by trade, as you would expect in the business of writing laws) are awash in "pop economics", cheap literature peddled by suspect gurus sponsored by interested parties. This creates a hegemonic but distorted view of the field that is then very hard to shake.

<comment><USER9> It's not just lawyer-politicians, but economic organisations like the IMF and the ECB. Stiglitz' book on the subject is excellent, including the anecdote about how we know that their advice is the same whatever the country and situation because someone once forgot to search-and-replace the country name before sending it out.

Then there's the Rheinhart-Rogoff excel error: [http://www.nytimes.com/2013/04/19/opinion/krugman-the- excel-...](http://www.nytimes.com/2013/04/19/opinion/krugman-the-excel- depression.html?_r=0)

<comment><USER10> Those organisations are sclerotic because they ultimately answer to politicians, not to academics; they are political constructs first and foremost, serving specific national interests, with heads nominated by political leaders and (surprise) often lawyers themselves (e.g. Lagarde). In fact, during recent events in Greece it became clear how their own researchers disagreed with the policies being pushed from the top. It's like developers were forced to write websites in PASCAL because their employers told them to.

The Excel error is also exemplary of what I referred to as "pop economics": a single argument was "divulged to death" and transformed into mainstream orthodoxy even though it was still being confuted in academic circles.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> I think there's a fundamental misunderstanding of what it is theoretical economists are doing.

A medical scientist runs experiments on rats, to gain insight into what the effects of a certain phenomenon might be on humans. Rats aren't humans, of course, but we think they share important characteristics with humans. Of course, human trials would be better---butbecause there are ethical and practical difficulties in performing human experiments in controlled environments, we are happy to accept the insights that come from studying rats.

Theoretical economics studies the interactions of idealized 'rational' actors. These aren't humans, of course, but like rats, we think they might share important characteristics with humans. Like rational actors, humans have things they want, and do respond to incentives. Economics is largely the study of systems of incentives.

You can gain insight into the systems of rational actors---and insofar as you believe the analogy between rational actors and humans, into human economic systems---by writing equations and proving theorems.

I'm sick of this theme that theoretical economists are these dogmatic lunatics who write equations on the board that have nothing to do with reality. They are in the business of crafting powerful arguments about human nature by analogy, which yes, aren't always accessible to those of us who haven't steeped ourselves in the math, but I think that is no reason to dismiss their insights as nonsense and saying they have a 'math problem'.

<comment><USER12> The issue is that assumptions such as perfectly rational actors can diverge so far from reality that it renders the resulting idealized conclusions meaningless from the perspective of actual human economies. The abstract study of incentives is of course interesting in its own right, but may have little to do with economics in practice -- i.e. the important practice of how actually should we run an economy.

What theoretical economists do is not 'nonsense' but can become nonsense when it naively forms the rationale for real-world policy.

<comment><USER11> Rats are, in some ways, very different from humans too. But if it's impossible to run human trials, or there are severe deficiencies in the way we are able to execute them, studying rats is still the best argument.

If there is a convincing empirical economic study that widely contradicts a theoretical consensus---yes, that evidence should be preferred. But that is not often the case, and otherwise the theoretical argument is simply the best argument there is.

What drives me bonkers, though, is the people who dismiss the math and its conclusions as being 'meaningless', but then what they substitute is not superior empirical arguments of their own, but their own emotional sentiments and undisciplined intuitions (typically decorated by cherry-picked historical observations).

<comment><USER12> The "rat is to human" (from a pharmaceutical perspective) as "rational actor is to human" (from an economic perspective) I think is a very fragile analogy. Rats and humans are very similar in their response to pharmaceuticals (and so serve as reasonable first model), but the difference between rational actor and human is so vast (at least in terms of how the real world works) that it calls into question the value of rational actor models for real-world policy.

In that case, the "theoretical argument is simply the best argument" is wrong; we should study economic history and human behavior rigorously and let that inform our policy. Theory can serve as a useful model when it is validated by some sort of observation and data -- but even when we cannot perform controlled studies there is not a knock-down argument that "theory" must be our best guess.

I agree that a person's interpretation of economics is very likely to be influenced by their idea of how the world _should_ work; but this is more a problem of our characteristic lack of critical self-reflection. And of course, we should have cogent arguments for our interpretation of economics, ideally rooted in objective evidence.

<comment><USER13> mathematical formalism was introduced precisely to allow the formulation of "cogent arguments". you can't evaluate the evidence without economic theory

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> One real world example is whether there are educational benefits to deworming a child population in developing world countries.

If you use economist math you see a benefit. If you use epidemeologist math you don't.

[http://www.cochrane.org/news/educational-benefits- deworming-...](http://www.cochrane.org/news/educational-benefits-deworming- children-questioned-re-analysis-flagship-study)

[http://www.cochrane.org/CD000371/INFECTN_deworming-school- ch...](http://www.cochrane.org/CD000371/INFECTN_deworming-school-children- developing-countries)

[http://www.theguardian.com/society/2015/jul/23/research- glob...](http://www.theguardian.com/society/2015/jul/23/research-global- deworming-programmes)

[http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b0659q1f](http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b0659q1f)

</comment><comment><USER15> Meanwhile machine learning is the high interest credit card of technical debt, what could go wrong? [http://research.google.com/pubs/pub43146.html](http://research.google.com/pubs/pub43146.html)

I entered stats through econometrics. I love econometrics. Econometrics is seriously hampered relative to other applied math fields by the inability to apply large scale casual experiments. For this reason parsimony is soooo important in modelling. Machine learning is the opposite of parsimony. Machine learning is wonderful for many applications, it lets us shrug off a first error of model selection, but it's not a panacea to the math problem and I think it actually might make it much worse.

</comment><comment><USER16> While pursuing PhD in Economics, I've supported myself working as a data scientist and, like ThePhysicist says, it's fairly disappointing that many are oblivious of datasets, APIs, libraries,..

A good example of what can be done ([http://econprediction.eecs.umich.edu/](http://econprediction.eecs.umich.edu/))

On the other side, the claim "literary types who lack the talent or training to hack their way through systems of equations" is groundless and mostly fallacious. The "literary types" have grasped many politicized inconsistencies and dedicate their research by deductive reasoning. Most of them are not 9/11 truthers.

</comment><comment><USER17> My insight in college taking some economics courses side by side higher level physics and engineering courses was that economics has mostly gotten stuck in algebra and has thus far failed to develop its calculus.

The easiest analogies for me to make are to electronics. Talking about cash/debt is like talking about instantaneous voltage. It's sort of interesting, but it isn't doing any actual work. In electronics it is the flow of that voltage, the current, that is more often more important and more interesting and more directly applicable to the "work" of a circuit...

I think you get a very different view of economics if you model it more like electronics circuits than just about any of the other economics models I see discussed. I've often wondered what would happen if someone actually bothered to attempt such a model and apply some deep scientific rigor to it.

<comment><USER18> Economists were modeling the economy using circuits in 1949 (see MONIAC), before the Integrated Circuit was even invented.

<comment><USER17> Thanks for the interesting reference to look up. I had not heard of the MONIAC before. Looks like this is also a sideways referent in Terry Pratchett's Making Money which draws in some interesting dots in that book.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> >That would make the techniques less interesting to many economists, who are usually more concerned about giving policy recommendations than in making forecasts.

Therein lies the real reason for the panoply broken economics models. They are more often used for the purpose of lobbying rather than for impartial prediction.

Much of the profession (particularly the elites) only exists as an intellectual pretext for maintaining and perpetuating existing power structures. It's about as scientific as the departments of Marxist economics were in the former Soviet Union or the Vatican in 15th century Italy.

</comment><comment><USER20> If economists could manage to get themselves thought of as humble, competent people on a level with dentists, that would be splendid.

<comment><USER21> My beef is when I read economists claims about perfect markets I think, 'Wow! With markets I should be able to solve the traveling salesman problem in polynomial time'

<comment><USER22> Well, I am not a big fan of today's "more debt, more gov't spending = more prosperity" but markets only parallelize a process and the best ones at this process survive while the worse ones drop out of the market.

So, in a sense, if you assume ideal markets to have an "infinite number of participants", then yes, you can solve TSP in polynomial time but otherwise they will just evolve like bitcoin miners which as of yet still didn't solve the "find a decent hash" problem an order of magnitude faster even though there are many of them.

My beef with economists is that they themselves are not subject to markets so the bad ones and the good ones survive and you end up with lots of noise.

<comment><USER19> >Well, I am not a big fan of today's "more debt, more gov't spending = more prosperity"

Because austerity is working out just brilliantly everywhere it's been tried?

What people tend to forget about government deficits and debt is that it is just one side of the economic coin. It's exactly the same thing as saying "the private sector saves too much".

<comment><USER23> 'Because austerity is working out just brilliantly everywhere it's been tried?'

Measured on what timescale?

<comment><USER19> Well, the IMF and ECB's time scale for predicted recovery in Greece has been 18 months ever since austerity was implemented in 2009.

So that's roughly four complete and total fuck ups in a row.

How much more time do you need?

There's always a chance, of course, that austerity is utterly destructive towards the Greek economy but very good for German financiers (with the ear of the ECB) who would like to pick up a port or state electric company on the cheap and who like the flood of cheap labor the austerity crisis has instigated.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> Pure economics should be about applying abstractions to help us understand the world. The world is pretty sophisticated, so I'm fine with mathematically sophisticated abstractions. Even when those abstractions fail intuitively, they _can_ be useful and extended for other subareas of economics or are simply philosophically fascinating. More often than not though, a lot of prominent theory seems impracticable or intractably limited. This is a valid criticism.

Noah Smith is slightly misdirecting his complaints though. If we're looking at applied economics or policy, the amount of math is not intimidating to anyone who has taken a couple of years of non-introductory statistics. The most important econometrics papers of the past few years apply basic regressions with only a few additional valid statistical techniques.

<comment><USER25> I'd think economics should be about describing systems in terms of cost, and finding how much a certain action will cost or profit the system. There is tons of economy to be found in the natural world, and it is mostly shunned by economists, and left to the naturalists. I don't know of any other science that ignores the natural world like that. And yes I see a problem with that. The probability of being wrong becomes huge. What good is an abstraction if it's wrong?

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> reminder: noah has never published an academic paper in economics and it looks unlikely that he ever will. he is simply not a competent guide to the field. this entire thread is a perfect example of the blind leading the blind: a journalist (noah) presents an entirely one sided view of the field, and intellectually lazy posters take it as a cue to dump on an entire academic field while freely admitting their ignorance of any of the details.

newsflash: most economists are acutely aware of the imperfections in their models. sure, you can find the blinkered and dogmatic, but that is unsurprising in such a large and varied field. the subject encompasses a serious variety of subjects and methods you (the hn poster) simply know nothing about. for example, machine learning techniques are really nothing new. theorists have been aware of the kahneman/tversky result for decades. please bear this in mind before you lazily declare the intellectual bankruptcy of the entire field.

p.s so-called econophysics was a direct attempt to apply models from hard science to economics and it has been a complete failure, since it lacks an underlying model of human behaviour. turns out this is quite important...

</comment><comment><USER26> I find it interesting that many economists tend to ignore the limits of their own theories.

For example, the dogma that markets tend toward efficiency.

This is true -- as long as certain axioms are not violated. But they seem to forget about the axioms on which their conclusions are built and march forward as if their conclusions are _absolutely_ true and apply that assumption to problems where they simply do not hold because the axioms on which they are built are violated.

To continue with the 'markets tend toward efficiency' conclusion: it does not hold when there are negative expectations for a party for _not_ making a transaction. And they invented a fudge factor to get around this a bit (that still doesn't work for all cases) which is to make sure the equations when taken in aggregate do not _generally_ lead to negative expectations for not making a transaction. This holds in many more cases but still not all.

Where does it fail and why does it matter? Well, the axioms underlying the 'markets tend toward efficiency' work great in capital markets. They tend to completely fail when pain or death is potentially involved in a transaction (severe negative expectations) but they may look like they _should_ work and you can find limited cases that _do_ work. So, basically war or crime or relationships or corruption or or poverty or healthcare or any other of those human interactions pain or death tend to come into play. A huge swath of sectors where politicians and special interests and the economists that inform them try to craft policy to fit a misapplied theory. Yet, economists march on pretending the theory holds from the axioms to the conclusions and on to the further conclusions built on those hold because 'mathematics' \-- who can argue with mathematics?

</comment><comment><USER27> I don't think a model based purely on empiricism will work. Because people will read about the model and try to correct for their biases.

On the other hand a purely game theoretic model is not satisfactory either because a lot of people wont read about the model, and wont act optimally.

Maybe a two-tiered model, with "fish" and "sharks" could be a solution.

<comment><USER28> Your comment demonstrates beautifully how economics is not an empirical science. Much of what is taught in economics is founded on a flawed premise.

</comment></comment><comment><USER29> This is really the important part of the article:

> Their overview stated that machine learning techniques emphasized causality > less than traditional economic statistical techniques, or what's usually > known as econometrics. In other words, machine learning is more about > forecasting than about understanding the effects of policy.

And it's true. Economists care more about forecasting than 'understanding the effects of policy' because the money is to be made forecasting while working for a bank or a large corporation.

Economics can't be codified the way physics can because economics models human behaviour (which is constantly changing), not physical laws than can be tested and retested.

</comment><comment><USER30> I shouldn't even comment on this BS article but here we go, duty calls ( [https://xkcd.com/386/](https://xkcd.com/386/) )…

1) First of all, let's make clear that there are no "the economists" and there is no "economics" that could be identified with whatever peeve _du jour_ of "the journalists". Economics as a field, understood as the study of exchange between decision-making agents in more or less large systems[1], is marked by an extreme diversity of approaches and opinions on even basic questions. From my superficial understanding of other fields, this seems to be a big difference between economics and the sciences, and on the other hand rather similar to the humanities. If you're going to criticize something, better make it specific and name names.

2) It is fashionable for "technical" people to scoff at the mathematics used in economic theory (basically, analysis, optimization, linear alg, and measure-theoretic prob), pretending that the problems arise because the tools are too primitive. First, perhaps they should remember that a lot of the foundations of mathematical economics were laid by people way above their paygrade. I'm talking about von Neumann, for example, or Fischer Black. Usually, when smart people do something that does not make sense to you, you take a step back and ask what _you_ might be missing, and usually there is a nontrivial answer to that question. Paul Romer, sorry, is a good economist but he has a BS in math. I would say that's my definition of a "lightweight when it comes to equations". That's not to say he shouldn't criticize, he should! But let's not pretend that there was no reason to "go formal" in economic theorizing or that there were/are easy modeling choices.

3) In my experience, most of the criticism of economic models comes from ignorance of the goal and context of a model and a too literal reading of the math. For example, if you take Markowitz's portfolio optimization (mean vs variance of a linear combination of a multivariate normal), it is correct that individual returns have non-exponentially decaying "heavy" tails, the copula is not (unconditionally) Gaussian, and risk is therefore not captured in variance and correlations (not least because they may in fact be undefined). But that is completely beside the point of the model, which is simply to express the idea that the risk of a portfolio is not necessarily additive and that there is a tradeoff between risk and return. The point being, although it is expressed in mathematical language, it is actually a qualitative model. Once you realize this difference to more descriptive models in the sciences, economic theory starts to make a lot more sense.

4) The real problem of economic theory may be the disconnect between how many people have a stake in it and how many people have the time and leisure and inclination and background to understand what the theorists are actually saying.

5) Side comment and half-reply to _ThePhysicist_ 's complaint: The reason to go with the "perfect gas"-type models in economic theory, I think, is that you are dealing with self-interested, utility-maximizing particles or "agents" -> acting particles. The thinking being that if you put in constraints of some form, say a short-sales constraint in a financial market model, you make the model very special. But in the messy real world agents would find a way around this particular constraint eventually. So the unconstrained general equilibrium models are trying to give you a big picture, "this is where the market tends to" type of result. There is so much more to be said on this point but I'm already way above my allocated time for this "duty call"...

6) Last but not least, let me state my opinion that there is nothing inherently noble about science. It is a method to gain knowledge, and it is contingent on the affordances of the field to which it is applied. In economic theory, your basic problem is lack of data. Now that may change in some subfields, and that's great. So the scientific method can be applied in those subfields eventually. But we need answers or opinions today for practical problems. I see economics as akin to philosophy how Russell [2] understood it. Let me quote him:

 _"Philosophy, as I shall understand the word, is something intermediate between theology and science. Like theology, it consists of speculations on matters as to which definite knowledge has, so far, been unascertainable; but like science, it appeals to human reason rather than to authority, whether that of tradition or that of revelation. All definite knowledge—so I should contend—belongs to science; all dogma as to what surpasses definite knowledge belongs to theology. But between theology and science there is a No Man's Land, exposed to attack from both sides; this No Man's Land is philosophy. Almost all the questions of most interest to speculative minds are such as science cannot answer, and the confident answers of theologians no longer seem so convincing as they did in former centuries."_

One should be aware of the limits of this approach but one should also not assume that there was a choice between science and this. If there was, it wouldn't even be a contest! The realm of science may get bigger over time, as more and more data is gathered, but again, we need answers today and in real time, not in 100 years, to decide on regulations, interest rates, portfolios or budgeting decisions. In almost all the big economic questions, your sample size is one and the possibility to experiment is nil. The world is arguably nonstationary on time-scales that matter, economic mechanisms change, and every statistical test and computational experiment is always a joint hypothesis test of your assumptions, about which I said in (1) above that there is and perhaps can be no consensus.

In short, it's not that people don't know there is a problem. It's that there has so far been no better solution.

______________________

[1] I'm just making this definition up on the fly but if someone has a better one, I'm all ears.

[2] B. Russell. A History of Western Philosophy. George Allen & Unwin, 1945.

</comment><comment><USER31> Economics is like fantasy football league. I predicts the future based on isolated personal preferences and ideologies of the "scientist", optionally sprinkled with small scale observations of data with dubious accuracy.

</comment><comment><USER32> Considering financial policies are the de-facto social discussion around the Globe, and progress of the human species is being discussed and perceived in financial terms, it is no wonder the role of philosophy has fallen to economists.

One can hope that data-driven economics could improve predictions, but keeping the theory discussion alive is vital, if we are to ever understand our goals as something more than increasing production and consumption (quantitative).

Using the correct set of data, has long been the main issue with economic theory conflicts, and data-driven economics can only make a difference (and a huge one) if that changes.

</comment><comment><USER33> The maths models used in economics are rarely checked against real-world data, but when they are they often turn out to be wrong.

A major instance of this problem comes from models used for trading, which often assume Gaussian distributions and Brownian-motion behaviors. According to those, extreme moves such as the ones occurring during economic crises such as the one of 2007 are several sigmas away from the mean -- making them supposed to happen perhaps once every 10^10 years. Yet they happen every 20 years. Taleb's book "Black Swan" is an interesting resource on this topic, for those interested.

<comment><USER13> gosh, i wonder why those traders use those simple, outdated models to make extraordinarily expensive decisions every singly day when they could just read the "black swan"

</comment></comment><comment><USER34> I like Mark Blyth's brief summary[1] of this problem. Not only is it important to base your theories on _actual data_ , it is also vitally important to remember that the map is not the territory. All models are an imperfect representation of reality, so they should always be viewed with appropriate scepticism, even when the math seems to work out elegantly.

[1] [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hmWbkPezgtU](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hmWbkPezgtU)

</comment><comment><USER35> There is a main difference between Physics and Economics. Physics tries to explain the laws of nature which do not change over time. But Economics tries to explain the laws of a system based on human knowledge and believes which is anything but robust. Using modeling techniques borrowed from Physics/Mathematics in the field of Economics can work very well but only if the laws you are investigating are robust over a given period of time.

Edit: typo

</comment><comment><USER36> If anyone is interested in something other than shitting on economics...

The other half of the article seems interesting. Does anyone have handy references (besides the Athey and Varian papers in the article) to how machine learning is being used to establish causation rather than focusing on prediction? I've heard several places that there have been big strides lately in this area, but I'm not sure where to look.

<comment><USER37> Here's a link to the slides that she used for the NBER talks. I've flipped through them and there seems to be some references to working papers (that Googling should be able to surface):

[https://onedrive.live.com/?cid=351055fdce7d0ff1&id=351055FDC...](https://onedrive.live.com/?cid=351055fdce7d0ff1&id=351055FDCE7D0FF1%21330395&ithint=folder,pdf&authkey=!ACqeqfcqAxdediE)

</comment></comment><comment><USER38> Doesn't (over-applied) machine learning just lead towards a variation of exactly the same problem?

Instead of "this model fits the curve and sounds attractive and sciencey" it becomes "this model fits the curve and was done by computer!"

Not really the "empiricism coming to economics" that the author claims, but I guess it could support better outcomes. For a while.

</comment><comment><USER39> Economics is fascinating because it is where ideology meets math.

Economics has a math problem only if you're not honest about your mathematical models reflecting an ideological position rather than "reality" (whatever that's meant to mean in the context of economics).

</comment><comment><USER40> I love watching smart people argue, so I love economics. Economics is a great source for jokes. "Economics is astrology for people who know calculus", "How many economists does it take to reach a conclusion?", and so on.

As much as I like picking on economists and watching them bicker, there's actually a method to the madness. (Except for the shills, I'm looking at you, Krugman[1]). When done correctly, economics becomes kind of a cross between a courtroom and a bullshitting session. People present various theories and sets of measurements. Lots of discussion around instrumentation and epistemology takes place. At the end of the day, the discussion wraps up to be something like "Given that most of us agree that these kinds of initial conditions mostly lead to these kinds of results, do most of us think that these kinds of initial conditions currently exist?" (Note that the "most of us" can very well be different sets of folks)

Oddly enough, it turns out that this kind of discussion has lots of real-world value.

Machine learning and deep learning especially has a pretty cool new role here, but it will never take of this dynamic ongoing discssion.

So no, economics doesn't have a math problem. It doesn't work like that. Perhaps a better way of putting is this: people who expect the world to be deterministic have a problem with economics. That situation is unlikely to change.

[1] I pick on Krugman because his shtick is already knowing the answer, no matter what the question is. He also likes showing us his Nobel. Somebody said once that every Krugman column should begin with "Damn fools!" In this way, this isn't economics; as far as I can tell it's personal aggrandizement using economics as a prop. A huge ego is a terrible thing to waste. But damn, it sure is entertaining!

[Several edits for clarity]

<comment><USER41> Good comment - I remember while studying economics (a subject I have always enjoyed) I got into an argument with some fellow students who felt that it was too 'fluffy' and 'not enough meat'. They wanted to do equations and get hard answers.

The truth is that Economics is the study of choices in a world of limited resources, and that the process is exactly as you have said : observing initial conditions, material decisions and subsequent outcomes. It is, as laid out by Adam Smith, also dependent on certain initial inputs (theory of moral sentiments) which produce rational actors.

The amusing thing for me is that, despite repeated tests and outcomes, people continue to think that they can wander off the reservation and get better outcomes with the same humans by trying different things to try and control the flow of limited resources. The results are rarely pretty, but the siren song of being able to improve things and be hailed a hero draws people into thinking the rules do not apply.

Krugman wandered off the reservation a while back and hasn't been worth reading since at least 2008.

The point is, you don't have to agree on economic policies to agree that it's not a hard science and shouldn't be treated as such.

<comment><USER39> 2008? That's a coincidental year. Around about the time of the last crisis and the beginning of austerity politics. The worst economic period since the Great Depression arguably. The rich getting ever richer. Real wages for most people stagnating or falling. Massive unemployment and under-employment. Quantitative Easing not creating real jobs and fixing infrastructure. Low interest rates (still!) Multinational corporations with so much money through tax evasion schemes that they literally don't know what to spend it on. The ongoing privatisation of public services which rarely if ever benefits the public. Essentially, ongoing class warfare and levels of inequality not seen in practically a century. Regulatory and political capture and political collusion. Trade agreements on the horizon being negotiated in secret that would exacerbate every issue already mentioned.

And you say Krugman has wandered off reservation? Rubbish. He's got to keep banging the same drum because nothing's getting fixed.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER42> The use of machine learning seems promising. One of the troubles with using regular mathematical equations is that at the end of the day economics is about human behaviour and that doesn't fit. Take a recent phenomenon like the 2008 crash. Banks increased lending, bankers made big bonuses while passing the risk on to various other parties and used some of the money to lobby politicians and keep the whole thing going until it suddenly collapsed leaving the other parties with the bill and the bankers with their bonuses. You're not going to capture that in a simple equation but running machine learning on say 50 previous crashes might get wise to what's happening.

I'm guessing you could run something like face recognition software but instead of faces it could recognise effects like the above and flash some politicians being paid off to turn a blind eye to high risk - give 'em a kick, warning or similar.

</comment><comment><USER43> I feel like Nassim Taleb (Fooled By Randomness, Black Swan, Antifragile) has been making a similar point for years now.

Unfortunately I don't know enough about economics to comment any more than that.

</comment><comment><USER44> Any recommendations on economics books with just the right amount of math, for non-economists with a college degree?

I'm looking for the economics equivalent of Feynman's lectures on physics.

<comment><USER4> The book I got recommended from Steve Keen, when I asked him a similar question, was J.M.Blatt: Dynamic Economic Systems. Although he has beautifully simple approach, it is really outside the standard economic theory and apart from Keen and perhaps few other individuals, sadly no one really follows in Blatt's footsteps.

<comment><USER13> keen is a complete charlatan and the laughing stock of the economic world. he doesn't even understand the basic economic theory he attempts to criticize

<comment><USER4> Are the believers in so-called "economic theory" so desperate that they have to resort to name calling?

I sincerely hope someday you would read Blatt's book with an open mind. It has _nothing_ to do with Keen, and on few pages with a bit of matrix math he obtains far better model than economists with their supply and demand curves can ever hope. (In fact, John von Neumann apparently had fingers in it too - shame he didn't live longer, we could have a proper economic theory today.)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER45> Capitalism is a greedy and cruel system where 2 + 2 = 4. Socialism is a a blessed system claiming that in a name of social responsibility and justice 2 + 2 should equal 7 (at least)</comment>