I've seen this ___domain submitted in the last year or so. Who or what is Lynalden? Are they an economist, or a blogger, or both?
Not that credentials are the be all end all, but what's different about this person vs anyone who's posting at SeekingAlpha, or any of the investing sub reddits?
She's very popular with the bitcoin crowd, tends to write respectable-looking articles legitimizing them. She's also quite a skilled self promoter. I assume that's why she gets so much attention, because her blog posts are usually pretty banal, basic stuff in my experience. Not the worst, but not particularly worthy of attention or praise, IMO.
Both authors are quite witty, so their blogs are eminently readable. They're also trained in economics (have PhDs in economics) and are econ professors, so I put a lot more stock in the stuff they write (useful heuristic, but some may disagree) than in lynalden's posts.
Economics is harder to separate from politics compared to other sciences, so it's especially useful to read multiple points of view and understand what the biases of authors lie/what the ongoing debates are. One thing I dislike about lynalden is her tendency to present as the one "true" economics Milton Friedman's monetarist theory of inflation, and doing so without explicitly calling out the hidden assumptions being made along the way or considering other theories of economics (e.g. Keynesian). OTOH, Noah and Brad can be categorized as Keynesian economists, so they present a more left-leaning view of the field of economics where the quantity theory of money is not accepted whole cloth.
> As an engineer, she's more bound by reality and reasons from first principles.
Reasoning from first principles (applying a priori dogma) and being bound by reality (responding to empirical cues) are generally opposed, the exception is when the dogmas are laid down by people who are bound by reality.
Much (but not all) engineering work is bounded by reality inherently because there is quick and non-murky feedback when it is wrong; this is a feature of the work, not the worker. Engineers working in economics (and even moreso in economic punditry than actual policy, though it's true either way) don't get that. And the available “first principle” dogmas they can choose to apply are either intentional pedagogical simplifications, poorly tested against reality by comparison to anything in most domains of engineering, or flatly falsified, often ideologically motivated, ideas.
1. Comparing the money supply per capita (a meaningless statistic) to the CPI
2. Comparing the price of oil to the CPI for mysterious reasons
3. Making up the "natural resource cycle", a novel concept
4. Strange remarks that suggest she doesn't understand the subject matter: "with the caveat being that the new assets they created are subject to credit risk so they should create this new money prudently" (banks don't create money on purpose, new money is created as a side effect when they make loans)
5. Saying that the other way of creating money is by "monetizing large fiscal deficits"
Nobody cares about the source as long as there is consistent profitability.Ego is the enemy most of the time, especially when you are more concerned about being right than about making money.
Not that credentials are the be all end all, but what's different about this person vs anyone who's posting at SeekingAlpha, or any of the investing sub reddits?