[HN Gopher] Danish government makes its new economic model open ...
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Danish government makes its new economic model open source
Author : HumanReadable
Score : 383 points
Date : 2022-01-21 17:19 UTC (5 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (github.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (github.com)
| gunfighthacksaw wrote:
| futharkshill wrote:
| An actual belief in this is ridiculous, and taking light on
| literal war and anti democratic effort and meme'ing it as
| "freedomed" is absolutely disgusting. You know that these are
| real human beings we are talking about right?
| gunfighthacksaw wrote:
| Oh wow, someone getting upset and moralistic at black humour.
| I've never seen this episode before.
|
| No, the real joke is that the US 'freedomed' a democratically
| elected socialist government and replaced them with a 'pro-
| freedom' dictator with the full support of other western
| countries, as they have done multiple times before.
| stusherwin wrote:
| An actual belief in what is ridiculous?
| salt-thrower wrote:
| I think that's part of the (dark) joke - "freedom" being the
| reason that the United States always gives before
| destabilizing a region and propping up corrupt dictators or
| puppet democracies which are anything but "free."
| whimsicalism wrote:
| You entirely misread the comment.
| lucian1900 wrote:
| The US decided to Chicago all of Chile because of what they did
| with Cybersyn: workers nationalising industry and planning
| production centrally.
|
| Denmark will be fine.
| boppo1 wrote:
| I don't understand the use of Chicago as a verb, can you
| help? Also, do we explicitly know it was the US, or just
| implicitly?
| guerrilla wrote:
| They're referring to the CIA assisted fascist coup where
| the Chicago Boys "ran" the economy afterward using it as a
| place to experiment with their ideology.
|
| 1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chicago_Boys
|
| 2.
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1973_Chilean_coup_d'%C3%A9tat
| lucian1900 wrote:
| I guess the Chicago police murdering black communists
| fits too, although I hadn't thought of that initially.
| boppo1 wrote:
| Thank you.
| SuoDuanDao wrote:
| Thanks for the explanation, I interpreted as 'Chicago'd'
| as a reference to the city of Chicago's high violent-
| crime rate.
| [deleted]
| aliceryhl wrote:
| What actually happened to them? It is unclear to me how this
| could harm Denmark.
| zardo wrote:
| A CIA assisted fascist coup followed by tens of thousands of
| murders by the new government to secure power.
|
| Not to say that's a good model for Denmark in 2022, but
| that's what happened in Chile in 1973.
| SuoDuanDao wrote:
| And the coup that ended the experiment happened on Sept.
| 11. As Shakespear had his characters say, If this were
| played upon a stage now, I could condemn it as an
| improbable fiction.
| decebalus1 wrote:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Cybersyn
|
| "The system was most useful in October 1972, when about
| 40,000 striking truck drivers blocked the access streets
| that converged towards Santiago. The strike was supported
| by the Patria y Libertad group and at least partly funded
| by private donors who had received money from the CIA.[5]
| According to Gustavo Silva (executive secretary of energy
| in CORFO), the system's telex machines helped organize the
| transport of resources into the city with only about 200
| trucks driven by strike-breakers, lessening the potential
| damage caused by the 40,000 striking truck drivers"
|
| Fascinating stuff.
|
| Afterwards, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1973_Chilean_coup
| _d%27%C3%A9ta... happened, to prove to the whole world how
| badly democratic socialism works.
| encryptluks2 wrote:
| [deleted]
| kasperni wrote:
| This model is supposed to replace the existing macro model
| cmoonly used in Denmark - ADAM (Annual Danish Aggregate Model)[1]
| which has been continuously developed and refined since 1970. You
| can find the yearly updates back to 1999 here.
|
| [1] https://www.dst.dk/en/Statistik/nyheder-analyser-
| publ/Publik... [2] https://www.dst.dk/da/Statistik/ADAM/Modellen-
| ADAM/Download
| daxuak wrote:
| I bet there has to be better solutions than github.
| [deleted]
| mkmk3 wrote:
| Perfect is the enemy of good. Sure there is, though the most
| popular alternative (Gitlab, from where I'm seated) IPO'd
| recently, and we know the effect that tends to have. Our
| national governments are already pretty comfortable with
| Microsoft products.
|
| Do you know any other git hosts that have persistently proven
| themselves trustworthy and have superior financial incentives?
| Otherwise it might be better to focus on the meat of this post
| Arnavion wrote:
| I'd be happy to focus on the meat of the post, but for
| completeness, the answer to your question is "The one you run
| yourselves."
| [deleted]
| m00dy wrote:
| Turkish Government needs to take a look at this.
| sshine wrote:
| Do you mean the Turkiye government? ;)
|
| (Reference to the recent news item that Erdogan made a public
| statement in which he renamed Turkey to Turkiye in English.)
| [deleted]
| throwawayboise wrote:
| Do countries get to declare how their names are spelled in
| other languages?
| xunn0026 wrote:
| Excuse me? Of course! Do people get to declare their name
| and pronoun?
| mortehu wrote:
| If that's your whole reasoning I think "of course!" is an
| overstatement.
| throwawayboise wrote:
| So Germany really decided that its name in English is
| "Germany" and not "Deutchland"?
|
| I always assumed those names originated externally.
| zhoujianfu wrote:
| I'm pretttttty sure it originates locally! Why would the
| U.S. tell China to call us "Meiguo", and why would China
| listen?
| cs702 wrote:
| Wow, cool! The model is specified as a constrained nonlinear
| optimization problem for which a solution is found using high-
| quality proprietary numerical solvers.[a] All partial
| differential equations specifying the model have a basis in
| economic theory or in heuristics and approximations shown to be
| consistent with reality. Parameters come directly from (what I
| assume is a large amount of) economic data collected by the
| Danish government.
|
| The authors working for the Danish government deserve an A+ for
| making their code and assumptions public, along with
| comprehensive high-quality documentation.[b] It was a delightful
| surprise to click on the link and find... a carefully curated
| repo.
|
| I have only one nitpicking: This looks like the kind of project
| that should have been -- and in fact _probably should be_ --
| implemented in Julia, instead of in a proprietary language. I
| suspect many heuristics and approximations could be more
| accurately modeled by ML components, interspersed between
| equations, as has long been proposed by Julia folks like Chris
| Rackauckas.
|
| --
|
| [a] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30028188
|
| [b] https://media.githubusercontent.com/media/DREAM-
| DK/MAKRO/mai...
| MAKROmaker wrote:
| Thanks! Julia was not even in 1.0 when we started the project,
| but would absolutely be a great choice today. So far, only the
| Conopt4 solver can solve our model, which means we have to go
| through GAMS even if we rewrite in Julia. I saw Rackauckas'
| JuliaCon presentation where he talks about ML approximations
| and immediately got excited too.
| sandGorgon wrote:
| What is your opinion of this vs Gurobi ?
|
| The only reason I ask is because your model is written in a
| proprietary language. While Gurobi models are written in
| Python (and solved by the silver).
|
| Just curious if you found it not effective.
| jlouis wrote:
| My guess is that the non-linearity of the problem might
| make it harder for something like Gurobi to solve. GAMS is
| essentially a frontend for solvers, so you are compiling
| your input source into a format suitable for an underlying
| solver or a set thereof.
| cs702 wrote:
| Thank you. That makes sense. Also, I fully get why you're
| excited: The use of "learnable components" for selectively
| replacing heuristics in models like yours seems like an ideal
| use case for Julia. (To me it looks like the future of
| modeling.)
| k2enemy wrote:
| FYI, the New York Fed's model is written in Julia and also open
| source.
|
| https://github.com/FRBNY-DSGE/DSGE.jl
| erdos4d wrote:
| I wonder if this includes Christiania, the billion Euros of
| cannabis sold there each year, and the big lift all those drug
| tourists impart on the local service industry. Beautiful place by
| the way, would recommend.
| futharkshill wrote:
| Why is it that all weed enthusiasts always believe that MJ has
| any relevance to the, in this case Danish, economy? The amount
| of MJ use in Denmark is minimal compared to other countries,
| and certainly there is no where near "billions" of Euros sold.
| Certainly "drug tourists" make little to no impact on the
| tourism of Copenhagen.
| simonklitj wrote:
| Maybe drug tourism has little impact, but 24% of adolescents
| report that they've used it in the past year, and 41% report
| they've tried it. With it being illegal, there's no doubt
| that a fair amount of money is being moved around society
| shadily because of it.
|
| Source (from 2015): https://www.dst.dk/da/informationsservice
| /blog/2015/12/narko...
| harles wrote:
| It's probably still less than what an average adolescence
| spends on burgers.
| simonklitj wrote:
| I think that's true.
| hjort-e wrote:
| Christiania is like the least beautiful place in the country...
| throwawayboise wrote:
| Yeah it's a dump. I traveled there a few years ago with a
| buddy who was very excited to visit Christiania, like it was
| the key thing he wanted to do on the whole trip. He came away
| pretty disappointed.
| petre wrote:
| I agree. We went to the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art and
| walked from the station. The surroundings are stunning. Rural
| Denmark looks really nice. Christiania not so much. A lot of
| dubious looking people in the station. At least they didn't
| attempt to sell us drugs, maybe thanks in part to Danish
| culture.
| riverdweller wrote:
| Great initiative, but I must ask: is the Greek compound formed
| from makro and gamy entirely accidental? Because it describes the
| past twenty years quite accurately.
| bigcat123 wrote:
| mediocregopher wrote:
| This is amazing! Whether or not every aspect of it is fully open-
| source, this is a great step forward towards governments being
| more transparent about how decisions are being made, and citizens
| being directly able to make positive contributions to that
| process.
| KingMachiavelli wrote:
| Does this contain the land value tax formulas or is this much
| higher level than individual property taxes?
| em500 wrote:
| Note that the model is implemented in GAMS[1], a proprietary
| language focused at constrained optimization problems (think
| Matlab, but more niche). This makes it a non-starter for most
| interested outsiders.
|
| [1]
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_Algebraic_Modeling_Sys...
| mountainriver wrote:
| Wow now I'm a fan of Denmark! This is the future of government!
| Guthur wrote:
| Soon they'll have our entire lives modelled out for us. Know
| what we'll be useful for, optimise to give us exactly what we
| need and nothing more. What could possibly go wrong.
| [deleted]
| TIPSIO wrote:
| Just now? Denmark is an interesting country for programming and
| technology education / discovery:
|
| https://www.quora.com/What-is-it-about-Denmark-that-many-wel...
| ricksunny wrote:
| Great! Are you familiar with the economic simulation work
| Threadneedle under Jacky Mallett in Iceland?
|
| https://github.com/jackymallett/Threadneedle
| dflock wrote:
| This is fantastic!
|
| I'm not qualified to make any, but are you expecting/hoping
| for/accepting pull requests?
| MAKROmaker wrote:
| Not expecting any, and the model is probably too complicated
| for outsiders to make substantial changes. But anyone is
| welcome and if the request is good I see no reason why we would
| not try to incorporate it.
| mbar84 wrote:
| Economics is not a science like physics. We can't do controlled
| experiments, we can't falsify hypothesis. This leads to very
| muddy waters and what you are left with are two kinds of
| economists: Those who tell people what they want to hear and
| those nobody listens to.
|
| Econometrics gives people everything they want to hear, and with
| a scientific veneer as a bonus. The HN crowd should however
| appreciate how susceptible this is to the tyranny of metrics.
| Claude-Frederic Bastiat warned of this over a century ago with
| his parable of the broken window: Think not only of what you can
| see (the glazier who is employed to repair the window), but also
| of what you cannot see (the alternative purchase of a suit) had
| the window not been broken.
| dkga wrote:
| First issue: "This is too cool to be true! #1"
|
| Nice! Kudos to DREAM!
| dane-pgp wrote:
| I've often wondered whether the first super-intelligent AI that
| gets created, if it somehow manages to be both under government
| control and not put to strictly military uses, might be tasked
| with modelling the economy and deciding on the "correct" set of
| economic policies.
|
| Extending the scope of AI decision-making outside of the realm of
| economics seems much harder, though, as there's much less
| training data for questions like how to educate students in a
| pandemic, or whether to loosen planning rules for building wind
| turbines.
|
| I suspect that before AI becomes capable of providing good
| answers to those questions, it will already have changed the
| world beyond recognition, and probably not in a good way. The
| best we can hope for is mass unemployment and a UBI, which will
| also make all economic models obsolete too.
| lifeisstillgood wrote:
| Isaac Asimov thought so too :-)
| ddesotto wrote:
| THIS is the way.
|
| It is a step forward in transparency (even though 90% of danes
| probably don't understand a thing of what was published) which is
| something no one I know is opposed to.
|
| Hope this sets a precedent for other countries to follow!
| hazza_n_dazza wrote:
| I guess the way is to verify and check the model over the
| coming years against the open data which initiated it... so
| we'll see :) these things can get quite chaotic when taking
| externalities into account.
| infogulch wrote:
| I bet studying this would be a good graduate-level economics
| course project.
| [deleted]
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