Chuck Schillken reports on the possibility that Chris Bosh, LeBron James, and Dwyane Wade will all team up in Miami, noting one potential problem with this scenario is that they’d each have to make less money than they otherwise might:

When free agency begins at 12:01 a.m. EDT Thursday, the Heat will have a league-high $43.3 million available in salary-cap space — if my math is correct, that’s $14.4 million each if the three superstars split it evenly.

So if this dream-team scenario takes place, it might cost each of them $2 million or more in potential pay. Sounds like a lot, but it may be worth it especially for James and Bosh, who are still seeking their first NBA championship rings.

In some ways I think the bigger logistical hurdle to this isn’t leaving the $2 million on the table, it’d be the fact that Chris Bosh isn’t nearly as good at basketball as James or Wade. Make no mistake, he’s good. But he’s not as good, so why should they all earn the same amount of money?

This scenario almost certainly won’t happen, but it does highlight some of the oddities created in the marketplace by the ascension of the cap on how much money a team is allowed to pay any one player. That habituates us to the idea that all really good players deserve “max contracts” and thus that it’s plausible to imagine these three guys splitting the pie evenly at a sub-max level.

The reassuring thing about a lot of the nonsense you hear from the right is to think to yourself “well, these guys are liars.” Other times you see something like this transcript of Rep Michele Bachmann talking to radio host Scott Hennen and you come face to face with the realization that some key figures in the movement are dumber than Jonah Goldberg:

HENNEN: What did you make of the G20 Summit this weekend in Toronto, in which President Obama says he’s going to call your bluff, Congresswoman Bachmann, about all this talk of, you know, deficits, because he’s going to cut the deficit in 2013. This after sending a letter in advance saying, whoah, be careful now with all this talk of reducing the deficit because we can’t stop this spending too quick or we’ll be in trouble there. What did you think of that?

BACHMANN: What really concerned me was Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner said that we don’t want to see one country’s economy doing better than another. What? This is the U.S. Treasury Secretary? We don’t want to see Zimbabwe’s economy do better than the United States? Aren’t we supposed to be about the United States and making sure that our economy can be the greatest in the world. If you look at the G20, what they’re trying to do is bind together the world’s economies. Look how that played out in the European Union when they bound all of those nations economies together and one of the smallest economies, Greece, when they got into trouble, that one little nation is bringing down the entire EU. Well, President Obama is trying to bind the United States into a global economy where all of our nations come together in a global economy. I don’t want the United States to be in a global economy where, where our economic future is bound to that of Zimbabwe. I can’t, we can’t necessarily trust the decisions that are being made financially in other countries. I don’t like the decisions that are being made in our own country, but certainly I don’t want to trust the value of my currency and my future to that of like a Chavez down in Venezuela. So I think clearly this is a very bad direction because when you join the economic policy of different nations, it is one short step to joining political unity and then you would have literally, a one world government. That’s not going to be, I think, helpful in the future for our country and I don’t want to cede United States authority to a transnational organization.

Of course the existence of a global economy in which events outside our borders impact us is not something Barack Obama dreamed up, and the idea that having world leaders gather for occasional meetings constitutes a “one world government” is insane. Is her idea that the President should never meet with anyone? Does that undermine our sovereignty?

Will Wilkinson notes that “a solid background in the philosophy of science is especially useful when it comes to explaining why many economic theories fail to meet the basic standards of adequate science.” That certainly seems true to me.

To oversimplify a bit for the sake of polemic, a lot of economics work seems to put more emphasis on “doing work that superficially resembles physics and therefore counts as science-like” rather than on doing work that actually resembles scientific endeavor in the sense of leading to useful predictions or technologies or what have you. You get the sense that some practitioners of economics would pick up The Origin of Species and dismiss it as too narrative to count as real science. This guy’s just arguing from a bunch of anecdotes!

These thoughts seemed relevant to me as at Paul Krugman’s suggestion, I read James Morley’s critique (PDF) of Dynamic Stochastic General Equilibrium modeling as a way of explaining macroeconomic outcomes:

However, in terms of really predicting the crisis, the award obviously goes to theories of endogenous financial crises inspired by the ideas of Hyman Minsky. Formal evaluation of these more narrative approaches is hard and there may be an element of the “stopped-clock syndrome” at play. But it would be foolish to dis- miss such theories out of hand. In particular, a ludicrous notion sometimes expressed in the ivory towers of academia is that, for Minsky to be taken seriously, his ideas need to be put into a DSGE model. Instead, the converse is true. For DSGE models to be taken more seriously outside of academia, they need to explain and predict as well as Minsky.

In these terms, there’s good reason to think it would be better if ideas as good as Minsky’s could be put into a more formal framework since that would make them more useful. But the correct ordering is that you start with theories that are doing some good and try to make them formal to make them more useful. Starting with formalisms that would be useful if they were accurate, and then endlessly tweaking the inputs so that in retrospect they give you the right answer is in some ways an interesting exercise but there’s a reason policymakers don’t rely on this work and it’s not that the policymakers are stuck in the past.