First: don’t under any
circumstances say anything original. The problem with saying something original
is this. Only about 0.1% of the human race produce original ideas, and only
about 1% recognise an original idea when it stares them in the face.
Thus if you set out an original
idea and send it in to some journal, there is only about a 1% chance of it
being published.
Second: far better is to take
some utterly banal idea, and present it in a slightly novel format, and add
some maths to make it look scientific. Here are some examples.
The Phillips Curve. It’s stark
staring bollocking obvious that there is some sort of relationship between
inflation and unemployment all else equal. That was known to anyone with more
than three brain cells long before Phillips took the idea and drew a graph to
represent the idea. David Hume (who had far more than three brain cells)
pointed to the relationship between inflation and unemployment about 200 years
ago. But that didn’t stop Phillips becoming a household name for his graph.
NAIRU. Well NAIRU is just a
trivial alteration to the Phillips curve. “Non Accelerating Inflation Rate of
Unemployment” just adds the idea that instead of inflation rising to some fixed
level when unemployment gets too low, it ACCELERATES. Yawn yawn.
The Laffer curve. For details on
the history of this, see Mike Norman here.
Or am I being too cycnical?
_________
P.S. (26th Dec. 2012).
The much heralded “Diamond-Dybvig” banking model is another example. Essentially all this model says is that “borrow
short and lend long”, which is what banks do, is risky. Only problem is that
that’s pretty much a statement of the obvious. Bagehot pointed to the dangers
of borrow short and lend long about 150 years ago. He said in reference to the
banking system, “But in exact proportion to the power of the system is its
delicacy, I should hardly say too much if I said its danger. . . . . Of the
many millions on Lombard Street, infinitely the greater proportion is held by
bankers or others on short notice or on demand; that is to say, the owners
could ask for it all any day they
please: in a panic some of the do as for some of it. If any large fraction of
that money really was demanded, our banking system and our industrial system
too would be in great danger.” (p.8 of “Lombard Street”).
And for comparison, here are the
first few sentences of the explanation of the DD model as set out by Wiki.
“The Diamond–Dybvig model is an
influential model of bank runs and related financial crises. The model shows
how banks' mix of illiquid assets (such as business or mortgage loans) and
liquid liabilities (deposits which may be withdrawn at any time) may give rise
to self-fulfilling panics among depositors. The model, published in 1983 by
Douglas W. Diamond of the University of Chicago and Philip H. Dybvig, then of
Yale University and now of Washington University in St. Louis, provides a
mathematical statement of the idea that an institution with long-maturity
assets and short-maturity liabilities may be unstable.
Presumably if someone set out a mathematical statement to the effect that daffodils flower in spring time, they'd be credited with discovering that daffodils flower in spring time.
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