David Altig Deflates Ball

Updating this post from a few days ago, David Altig reacted like I did to Philip Ball's column in the Financial Times:

Fisking Philip Ball, by David Altig, macroblog: A few days ago Mark Thoma posted an article by Philip Ball, "consultant editor of Nature", taking economists to task for, well, being economists.  Although Mark handled the rebuttal quite nicely, and there was lots and lots of fine commentary on Mark's site (a good chunk of which is summarized by Dave Iverson), I found the article so wrong-headed that I just can't help myself from commenting.  So, a-commenting I go... [continue reading...]

David has a long, thorough, rebuttal illustrating Ball's "wrong-headed" assertions. Here's a taste of David's reaction:

Don't like calling it a cycle?  Fine. Call it Aggregate Fluctuations.  Call it Co-Movement In Business Statistics.  Call it a Kumquat.  Just don't pretend a picky semantic point is serious criticism. ...