Tag Archives: Paul Romer

(Photo via Flickr) Guest post by Jeff Mosenkis of Innovations for Poverty Action I realized after I posted it last week that it was my 200th links, which is a nice occasion to acknowledge and thank my colleague Cara Vu, who, despite being one of the busiest people I know, edits them and saves me from self-humiliation on a weekly basis. She catches between 8 and 200 mistakes in every one.And also thanks for reading. I really do appreciate the occasional emails, twitter shout outs, and...

Knowledge as a factor of production. Knowledge is broader than information. Knowledge includes tacit knowledge, skill, and critical and creative thinking. In other words, the study of knowledge involves epistemology, logic and language, psychology, and other relevant fields in addition to information.  Information can be formalized but a great deal of knowledge cannot, at least given present limitations and future prospects through technology. Labor as the human component of...

Guest post by Jeff Mosenkis of Innovations for Poverty Action. At IPA even our water spills our normally distributed (or Halloween-themed, depending on your perspective)David McKenzie has updated an amazing list of all of the Development Impact Blog’s methodology posts, categorized by topic.A reminder for the academic interview fly-out season that I’ve seen a few people mention: don’t assume grad students can afford to put travel on their credit cards and wait to be reimbursed; offer to book...

I wholeheartedly agree with our newest Nobel Laureate. Quite right that a large chunk of mainstream macroeconomics has made itself irrelevant. I’m not sure about the thirty years estimate as my feeling is that it goes back even further, but that’s an academic question. Regardless of when it started, the bottom line is that we are in a terrible place today. Economics graduate students are increasingly avoiding taking specializations in macroeconomics and our discipline was hopelessly...

Avoiding mathiness and economism. Conversable EconomistSome Thoughts About Economic Exposition in Math and WordsTimothy Taylor | Managing editor of the Journal of Economic Perspectives, based at Macalester College in St. Paul, Minnesota

Paul Romer, recently appointed Chief Economist at the World Bank, has a stunning idea for Sweden described here. See the original article here.According to Romer, Sweden should just allow a *completely independent* new state within Sweden, free from Swedish law where millions of migrants can live under their own laws without even being Swedish citizens. In other words, let’s just create a massive No Go Zone right in the middle of Sweden! Because these have worked so well in the rest of the...