Shared by JohnH

HatTip to Dave Lull for letting me know of the update.

136- The Irish Potato Famine, Mother of All Errors from Optimization Models, Those unethical economists

I find it both unethical (& blind) on the part of economists to teach Ricardo’s comparative advantage (something that is “optimal” under some set of fixed, nonstochastic assumptions, i.e. price of goods remain fixed) without telling us about the Irish potato famine, the exact result of a model error coming from monoculture. In the mid-19th Century, one and a half million persons died, another million emigrated (mostly to the U.S.). I found so many cases of collapses coming from such optimization (Egypt from cotton, American Indians in the SouthWest, silk in Lebanon).In my rewriting of all of economics under model errors (and epistemic opacity) I find that every quantitative “Nobel” since Samuelson so harmful … it is revolting.