On: Milton Friedman: How to Cure Health Care (2001)

[amalcon]

These usually just result in people picking holes in the dataset/experiment/simulation -- and rightly so; circumstances change too quickly for historical data to be much use, simulations necessarily have some severe assumptions, and small-scale tests don't simulate macroeconomic effects very well.

This is the reason that I've long classified macroeconomics in with religion: they're both very influential ideas, but neither are really based on any evidence.

[limmeau → amalcon]

Hmm yes... fairly quickly, one runs out of large rich countries at the beginnings of twenty-first centuries to draw parallels from.

I liked A Mind Forever Voyaging, though, which is about an attempt to do c) properly.