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The Congressional Budget Office (OMB), the Council of Economic Advisors (CEA), the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget (CRFB), the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) all use quite sophisticated forms of a spreadsheet and they all come up with different projections for debt, deficits, GDP and inflation, etc. … because they use different assumptions.
See, I told you so, those darn spreadsheets will find any answer you like.😱😁
My father was a business professor whose specialty was accounting. He refused to ever use a computer and required his students to buy a Boorum & Pease “Columnar Pad”, 17″ x 14″. These were the paper spreadsheets of the day. I retained two of them from his estate.
Perish the thought that I would ever use one!
When I was in public accounting I loved excel spreadsheets and how one small change would make the numbers what I wanted them to be. Granted I was not working on projections of our deficit, debt, GDP or inflation but it gave me the power to do what I wanted.
Neither MS Excel nor MS Word make assumptions. People make assumptions. Doesn’t matter if you use a spreadsheet, Fortran, C++, or a yellow legal pad and pencil. You can even make assumptions in a comment to another’s post. There is no difference.
You can’t make any predictions about the future without assumptions. That means you always have to evaluate the assumptions you make and do the best you can.
Of course. Who would anyone think otherwise. Seems a challenge for some on HD to recognize a joke. 🤪
Humor often doesn’t come over as intended online. It’s a literal medium and irony is frequently overlooked or misunderstood. Emojis notwithstanding.
Apparently so.
I got it Dick.
I think your scorn for such things relates to a fundamental lack of numeracy and/or confidence in using numbers. A spreadsheet is neither good nor bad – it is simply a tool for recording and manipulating data.
Anyone vaguely competent using one in the field of personal finance appreciates the limitations which obviously relate to the input variables. The fact that you don’t get a single unambiguous answer from spreadsheet models is a feature not a bug – it helps us identify factors which have the greatest impact/sensitivity and derive ranges of possible outcomes from reasonable ranges of assumptions.
This is exactly right, especially the 2nd part. Understanding the sensitivity to different variables is key to good analytics, in any field.
Dick, you keep harping on the same themes: your distaste for spreadsheets, your fondness for guaranteed retirement income, your scorn for the FIRE movement, how you think present value calculations are meaningless, etc. I — and I suspect other readers — would love you to give these topics a rest and instead pontificate on other subjects. I miss the Dick Quinn who used to write amusing posts with observations from the coffee shop and the grocery store.
It was a joke, nothing more, hence the emojis.
I think you just love a good lively debate 😂
More fiction has been written in Excel than in Word.
Troublemaker!😁
Food for thought though 😎