For the sick there is no slope, for bricks there is no medicine
(… by ear it seems to me that it was like this, perhaps I could be wrong, but certainly by little …)
(… I don't want to make it too long, but there are some points that in my opinion are worth delving into. Obviously those that "Senator, why are you wasting time with these characters?" have already been blocked on Twitter and will be unblocked only if will go in person to the jubilee on November 16th …)
Summary of previous episodes
In the post on " Gli epigoni " I showed you that a certain Matteo Brandi had taken, with an inadequate caption, a graphic from our end-of-year post:
The reason why such a caption is inadequate is obvious: any passing heurist will easily be able to object that in the graph the deviation of GDP from its trend trajectory has become apparent since 2009, so it is not clear what the hell the euro has to do with it. For Sciura Maria the euro began when she found it in her pocket (on January 1, 2002), for the midwits it began in 1999, and for the experts in 1997 (for the reasons explained for example here : the path towards the euro expected in the previous two years the national currency to maintain its exchange rate with the ECU/EUR within an extremely narrow fluctuation band, so that de facto we have been in the euro since 1997). This total lack of correlation leads to an easily avoidable own goal (I will demonstrate this below). Moreover, a similar disaster could easily have happened even in the days of the lira, if it had been decided to cut public investments by 33%. The problem is to understand why in a fixed exchange rate regime, and therefore, a fortiori , in a monetary union, the adjustment of external imbalances is discharged on absorption , i.e. on internal demand. But with that graph you don't make it clear and therefore you unnecessarily put yourself in a weak dialectical position. You will gain a strong dialectical position if you title the graph "The success of austerity". Everyone remembers that austerity began during the Great Financial Crisis, but almost no one knows what damage it did.
Do you remember the concept expressed many times that if you are in conditions of numerical inferiority you must choose the battlefield carefully? Here: the friendly film maker gave you an example of how to do the opposite!
For unspecified reasons, however, the debate on Twitter took another path, which was of much less interest to me: that of the authorship of the graph. I find arguments fun when I know how they end, and this ended as I'll quickly explain.
Brandi says that the source was not me but a post by a certain Trombetta dated July 13, 2023, this:
where you will notice the comment, which exemplifies the thing that bothered me (the own goal).
I pointed out two things:
- that the comment on this graph was very amateurish (I'll come back to it later);
- which in any case, given that the topic of intellectual property was passionate, this graph was taken from a post of mine from May 22nd .
Stop the useless massacre!
Having reiterated (and I will prove it to you later) that intellectual property was not the issue , after this question a normal person would have stopped. But here we are dealing with exceptional individuals! At this point Trombetta accused me of having plagiarized a work by my friend Gennaro Zezza dating back to 2019 and which Trombetta had cited, reporting the source, on 24 July of that year :
At this point I could only answer like this :
quoting a previous post of mine from 2018 which carried out this analysis " for future reference ", and specifying that Gennaro had most likely not copied me! Unfortunately these here are missing #lebbasi, and one of the bases is that NIHIL EST IN INTELLECTU QUOD PRIUS NON FUERIT IN GOOFYNOMICS.
To avoid any misunderstanding, I also remembered that the first analysis of this kind that I remembered was done to criticize the late Saccomanni in 2013 , and therefore perhaps we could just leave it there.
At this point the Trombetta could only sound off topic, and therefore the response became " gnegnegnè you voted to trust Draghi! ":
(…and thank goodness, otherwise he would be President of the Republic today!…).
Having established the fact that Trombetta does not know how to write graphs, the other point remained to be ascertained, the most relevant one, namely the fact that he does not know how to read them. Very serious fact because it led brother Brandi into error!
"Mathematical" Interlude
Below I put two series of data: one that grows linearly, and the other that grows at a constant growth rate of 5%. I remind you that the growth rate is always calculated in the same way:
Take a look:
and here is the graph:
What do you notice? You should notice something that I have always drawn your attention to: 1 is 10% of 10, but also 5% of 20, but also 1% of 100. What do I mean? I mean that if a series grows with a constant increase, that is, it increases linearly (in the example, it increases by 1 in each time interval, so it goes from 20 to 21, from 21 to 22, etc.), its growth rate is decreasing because the same constant quantity x ( t ) – x ( t -1), equal to 1 in the example, is divided by a progressively increasing x ( t -1).
Conversely, if a series grows at a constant growth rate , its increments are gradually larger, because 5% of 20 is always 1, but 5% of 40 is 2, 5% of 100 is 5, etc. You're getting there, right? Because you are normal people, so you understand that:
- a series that follows a linear trend will have a decreasing growth rate;
- a series that has a constant growth rate follows an exponential trend.
This isn't huge news. Here, for example, we have often noticed that the growth rate of almost all European economies has been decreasing , as a consequence of a physiological process of convergence ( catch up ). We pointed this out to the decline scoundrels , and is the consequence of this physiological fact that the real GDP of the European economies follows a trend? Linear! Well done! (Thank you).
And in fact, in the post on denied growth we saw in particular that a linear trend offers a sufficiently accurate (descriptive) approximation for the GDP of France, Germany and Italy, with the only problem that in Italy in 2009 the trend breaks and becomes flat (and we have seen that this essentially depends on a collapse in public investments). But as long as the series remains in a linear trend, this does not mean that their growth rate is constant: it means that it is decreasing. If, however, the growth rate remained constant, we would necessarily observe an exponential.
Jim Carey and Jeff Daniels
…and let's go back to yesterday's debate.
In my post I pointed out that the description that my friend Trombetta ( sed magis amica veritas ) provides of "his" graph is profoundly misleading. In fact, he says verbatim:
Italy's average annual real GDP growth rate was 5.7% between 1946 and 1991, 0.6% since joining the European Union and 0.4% since adopting the euro . If the growth rate [ since when? Since entry into the EU, it seems to understand… ] if the one prior to entry into the EU and the Eurozone had remained [ i.e. at 5.7%, it seems to understand ], today Italy's GDP would be almost 500% larger billion euros.
(you can check it above).
This, I'm sorry to point out to my friend Trombetta, is gigantic nonsense! If the growth rate had been constant since 1992 at 5.7% we would have in fact observed the trend of the orange line:
for the obvious reasons described above. It was not therefore necessary to say "If the growth rate had remained the previous one", but "if the GDP had remained on its previous trend" (and therefore had continued to develop with a decreasing growth rate, not constant and equal to the value before the entry into the EU).
You have understood this, because you may be poorly prepared, but at least you are not left-wing! You are therefore immune from the philosophy of piddino, the knowledge of knowing, without knowing a beloved, that philosophy that we described here , comparing ourselves with a sesquipedal idiot according to whom a 200% increase was equivalent to a doubling. I don't know if you remember:
Incredible dictu , last night, on the sidelines of this futile, but not useless, debate (I'm sure some of you understood the difference between linear and exponential a little better), something almost worse arrived!
The phenomenon, this one , first made a bold debut with a tweet like this:
then deleted. It smells a bit like ricotta from regurgitation, like a student of some type of fainans , I don't think of great reading or classical studies (which in any case no longer exist, so in this case it's a justified absence). This can be understood from the fact that instead of a growth rate he talks about an "annual compound rate of return" (the return on GDP? How do you speak, brother?), but the question had nothing to do with it, and the guy's potential accident risk leaked out from the his belief that he is the bearer of the truth, in the face of the obscurantism represented by the idiot fasces (me):
Since I have never seen a person not understand shit with so much intensity, I thought it would be interesting for you to see the development (or rather, the envelope) of this lost soul's reasoning (not spun even by his closest relatives, it must be said):
Pure delirium, but indicative of the "brick" cultural climate and the level of degradation of the black toilet! Even from here, however, a teacher knows how to draw useful lessons. Given that it had been made clear to this delusional know-it-all several times that he had to read the blog and that he would then understand that the exponential profile was the one that arose from Trombetta's amateurish counterfactual (remember: "If the growth rate had remained the previous one… ):
It seems clear to me that the basics of everything are missing here: mathematics, statistics, but also the ability to read a text!
This is demonstrated by the fact that the porello tries to interpolate the GDP with an exponential (feminine: exponential function) since 1950, which would presuppose that the GDP growth rate had been constant from 1950 to today (for the obvious reasons set out above) . And when anyone pointed it out to him, the poor child responded like this:
But one thing is certain: if he's smart, I'm an idiot. But smart, because without experience of functional studies I managed to get qualified as a full professor. I don't know whether the degradation of the Italian university is better demonstrated by my unpreparedness or by Federico's preparation: I leave it up to you to decide!
The moral of the story
In just thirty minutes (I have to go out with my wife).
Meanwhile: these are irrecoverable. However, they have the advantage of being few.
Then: it's always the same story. People talk but don't listen. To me, who clearly said that I didn't care if my material was used as long as it was used well, the film maker replied:
Now: I don't point it out to him (because he wouldn't be able to understand it), but I do to you: obviously I know how to make a graph recognizable, and for some time I even did it. For example, look at this one, taken from here :
(… incidentally: a post that was highly applauded at the time, but evidence of political illiteracy on an almost Brickist level: only that I had hope of growing up …).
In your opinion, if I used watermarks and stopped doing so, am I interested in claiming my intellectual property or not? I'd say no, right?
And in your opinion, why did I stop doing it?
Here we enter into a political discourse which is also a déjà-vu . A long, long time ago I had an argument with a friend. I told you about it here . At the basis of that argument was his idea, developed around December 2012, of converting the work of my blog into a slim flyer, with just a few points (pointillism, an infantile disease of dissemination), perhaps with some expressive graphics ( I don't remember which of the blog's graphics he considered expressive), which would then have been spread with a sort of guerrilla marketing operation to attract consensus on I don't know which particle in view of the 2013 political elections.
So: with my dissemination work (and with the core of blog readers) a political work with unclear contours should have been carried out, for the benefit of no one knows exactly who.
My position at the time was very simple: since the blog was, at the time, a third-party source and therefore somehow relatively credible, and since the brass and the swords didn't mind, at the time certain things only I I was able to make her understand in a convincing way (this was demonstrated by the consensus of the blog, which was the school of fish around which many sharks, more dogs than fish, revolved), in my opinion if there was material to be spread, that material had to be made recognizable as coming from Goofynomics, to bring as many people as possible to the Debate, and not anonymized as if it originated from a galaxy of unlikely losers (I remember that I called them "the barefoot Marxians of Valnerina", for a series of reasons which I will spare you and which who was there remembers…). It didn't seem appropriate to associate my scientific and popular work with the discredit of a folkloric and unlikely political affiliation!
Obviously we didn't agree on this: on one side there was me, who is what you see and who you should know, after thirteen years of assiduous conversation in which I opened up to you, and on the other side there was the usual story: the little political ambition, the rush, the urgency, the inability to elaborate on one's own, etc. All things that would have led to disaster anyway, hence my favorite motto at that time: divided we win.
And divided I won, at least if we evaluate my journey with the metric of those who would have liked to do it themselves!
Now, in fact, the problem no longer arises, for a very simple reason. For those who don't know me, I'm "er senator from 'a Lega", so I'm an a priori unreliable source because I'm biased. If I made "my" contents identifiable as such, I would ipso facto make them unusable, because the person to whom you would like to submit them would curl up in an armor of anti-Lega prejudices. This is the rational reason why I no longer use watermarks for some time (I actually stopped long before entering politics, because already when I was a visible public figure obviously any idiot thought he could judge me on the basis of my alleged ideal affiliations ).
But this does not mean that the materials, points of view and data processing that I make available to you should be used in an amateurish way! Those who do so damage not only themselves, that is, nothingness: they damage all of us, discrediting those who defend certain positions. And we can't afford this.
As Giulia said a few days ago, and as we had predicted, of all the self-proclaimed "mijoni" in the pandemic there is only a bit of anti-political sludge left , the real issues (the distribution of income, therefore the euro, the compatibility of the EU with our democratic order, etc.) are forcefully reappearing, and obviously the many orphans of the virus, who are not only Burioni and Bassetti, but also the anti-Burioni and the anti-Bassetti, will reposition themselves on these issues, doing a lot of damage! The adrenaline of 100 likes under the tweet is indispensable: you position yourself on the topics that appeal… at the risk of pushing them to the core!
You will see that what I predict here will happen. We will have to be very good at holding the bar and remembering that there is literature and scientific rigor behind our conclusions. Conversely, from the nonsense that others will do, we will be able to retrospectively understand how accurate their way of informing us on other topics was.
Time is always a useful sieve, even if it does not always bring about the transformations we would hope it would bring.
You have to know how to be satisfied!
This is a machine translation of a post (in Italian) written by Alberto Bagnai and published on Goofynomics at the URL https://goofynomics.blogspot.com/2024/01/pei-malati-ce-la-china-pe-mattoni-non.html on Thu, 04 Jan 2024 19:29:00 +0000. Some rights reserved under CC BY-NC-ND 3.0 license.