What is more, it takes enormous effort to socially construct economic “data”. Who even had good data before Friedman and Schwartz?
Scott writes: I seem to recall you arguing that Hayek didn’t even know NGDP had plunged sharply in the early 1930s. Perhaps that is one reason why economics became more mathematical. People who didn’t understand what was going on looked pretty silly. And the only way to understand what was going on was to look at numbers.
