Tag Archives: Economics

Jeffrey Sachs — studying neoclassical economics make students less ‘pro-social’ Students trained in egoistic game theory, notably in university courses in neoclassical economics, are less likely to cooperate in laboratory settings. There is now a large literature on the lower levels of pro-sociality of economics students compared with non-economics students … The findings of low pro-sociality among economics students are robust; the interpretation, however, has differed between those who...

Yesterday, I attended a panel discussion on the "Sharing Economy" at the Battle of Ideas. Benita Matovska, who describes herself as "chief sharer" of the comparison website Compare & Share, enthused about how the Sharing Economy would build communities, transform capitalism and restore the planet. "It's all about trust," she said.No it isn't. It's all about money.Here's what Matovska herself says on the Compare & Share website. I was trying to book a family holiday in Morocco - when...

Why experimental economics is no real alternative to neoclassical economics One obvious interpretation is that Model-Platonism implies that economic models are Platonic, if they take the form of thought-experiments, which use idealized conceptions of certain objects or entities (Platonic archetypes). This clearly sounds like a pretty familiar procedure, although the rationale for the thought-experimental character of economic models (if they are conceived as such) has been transformed over...

Why the euro divides Europe The ‘European idea’—or better: ideology—notwithstanding, the euro has split Europe in two. As the engine of an ever-closer union the currency’s balance sheet has been disastrous. Norway and Switzerland will not be joining the eu any time soon; Britain is actively considering leaving it altogether. Sweden and Denmark were supposed to adopt the euro at some point; that is now off the table. The Eurozone itself is split between surplus and deficit countries, North...

Dumb and Dumber — the Chicago version Macroeconomics was born as a distinct field in the 1940s (sic!), as a part of the intellectual response to the Great Depression. The term then referred to the body of knowledge and expertise that we hoped would prevent the recurrence of that economic disaster. My thesis in this lecture is that macroeconomics in this original sense has succeeded: Its central problem of depression-prevention has been solved, for all practical purposes, and has in fact...

Angus Deaton on the limited value of RCTs I think economists, especially development economists, are sort of like economists in the 50’s with regressions. They have a magic tool but they don’t yet have much of an idea of the problems with that magic tool. And there are a lot of them. I think it’s just like any other method of estimation, it has its advantages and disadvantages. I think RCTs rarely meet the hype. People turned to RCTs because they got tired of all the arguments over...

Economics textbooks — when the model becomes the message Wendy Carlin and David Soskice have a new intermediate macroeonomics textbook — Macroeconomics: Institutions, Instability, and the Financial System (Oxford University Press 2015) — out on the market. It builds more than most other intermediate macroeconomics textbooks on supplying the student with a “systematic way of thinking through problems” with the help of formal-mathematical models. Carlin and Soskice explicitly adapts a ‘New...

I'm bored.Bored with this crisis. Bored with endless calls for bank reforms. Bored with never-ending stories of inadequate bank resolution and legal battles which benefit no-one but lawyers. Bored with ineffectual monetary policy and fiscal gridlock. Bored with seeing the same things proposed over and over again, even things we know don't work and will never happen.Today, Mike Konczal wrote a piece on why restoring Glass-Steagall wouldn't solve anything. He's right, of course. But it is now...

Representative agent models — macroeconomic foundations made of sand Representative-agent models suffer from an inherent, and, in my view, fatal, flaw: they can’t explain any real macroeconomic phenomenon, because a macroeconomic phenomenon has to encompass something more than the decision of a single agent, even an omniscient central planner. At best, the representative agent is just a device for solving an otherwise intractable general-equilibrium model, which is how I think Lucas...

Excellent and not so excellent Nobel prize winners A truly excellent economics Nobel Prize–I have learned a lot from Angus Deaton. And I look at my desk and see my copy of Akerlof and Shiller’s Phishing for Phools that I am halfway through on my desk. And I think about the panel I was on with Paul Krugman at New York Comic Con yesterday. There is a subset of economics Nobel Prize winners who are true geniuses, from whom I have learned and continue to learn an immense amount. But then I...