faulker020

Short version : I've joined Bloomberg View as a full-time writer. I'm leaving Stony Brook , and leaving academia, effective August 15, 2016. Bloomberg View had approached me a year ago about possibly working for them full-time. So I took a 1-year leave from Stony Brook, partially to finish some research stuff I had to do, and partially to decide whether I should switch jobs (I retained my Stony Brook affiliation during that time, and kept advising students and working with Stony Brook professors, but didn't teach classes). Early this year, Bloomberg made me a very nice offer for a full-time position, and I decided to take it. The offer included the chance to live in the San Francisco Bay Area, where I've long wanted to live, so I've moved to SF. Longer version : Back in 2006, the original reason I thought of getting an econ PhD was actually to become an econ pundit and writer. I saw the quality of the econ commentary out there, and decided that it could be much impr...

There was a bit of a blow-up earlier this year over Gerald Friedman's analysis of Bernie Sanders' economic plans. Paul Krugman, Christina and David Romer, Brad DeLong and others (including yours truly ) said that Friedman was being overly optimistic about the effects of stimulus - some said he had overestimated the remaining output gap, others questioned the use of " Verdoorn's Law " to predict that stimulus can increase productivity growth to very high levels. Others, like JW Mason and Dean Baker, defended Sanders. To me, it seemed that the coup-de-grace was delivered by Justin Wolfers : When I pointed Mr. Friedman to this critique of his analysis, he simultaneously accepted and rejected it  He accepted it, telling me that “I may have made a mistake.”  But he also rejected this critique, arguing that his figures are based on an alternative view of the world, stating: “To me, when the government spends money, stimulates the economy, hires people who spend, that s...

I like to keep track of "econ diss" articles, since that's what this blog was mostly about for its first few years of existence. Most of them leave a lot to be desired . But here's one I really like , in Aeon magazine, by philosophy prof Alan Levinovitz. Levinovitz likens modern-day macroeconomics to mathematical astrology in the early Chinese empire. And in fact, the parallel sounds pretty accurate. The article is worth reading just to learn about classical Chinese astrology, actually. But anyway, Levinovitz draws heavily on the econ disses of Paul Romer : ‘I’ve come to the position that there should be a stronger bias against the use of math,’ Romer explained to me. ‘If somebody came and said: “Look, I have this Earth-changing insight about economics, but the only way I can express it is by making use of the quirks of the Latin language”, we’d say go to hell, unless they could convince us it was really essential. The burden of proof is on them.’  ...and  Paul Pfleid...

A while ago I went on a rant about the dangers of "101ism" , which is a word I made up for when people use an oversimplified or just plain wrong version of Econ 101 in policy discussions. Well, here I have a perfect example for you. And among the culprits was me. It started when American Enterprise Institute scholar Mark J. Perry tweeted the following graph about minimum wage: I was annoyed by the word "actually". My current pet peeve is people not paying attention to empirical evidence - I think if you say "actually", there should be more than just a theory backing you up, especially if evidence is actually available. So I started giving Mark a hard time about ignoring the empirical evidence on the minimum wage question.  That's when Alex Tabarrok jumped in and defended the cartoon , saying that it's just a basic supply-and-demand model: But that's not right. This cartoon actually doesn't show the basic D-S model at all. Let's look a...

Much of the discussion about econ methods these days revolves around the "credibility revolution", and the broader rise of empirics in general. Despite scattered protests  from various quarters of the discipline, there looks to be no stopping the transformation of econ into an empirical, evidence-based field. But the shift isn't just healthy - it's also a golden opportunity for economists to do what social scientists love best, which is to go on a giant raid and conquer the other social sciences! The new empiricism is the amphibious assault ship that will carry hordes of Econquerors (heh) to the vulnerable shores of sociology.  The first big econ raid on sociology came from Gary Becker and other theorists in the 70s and 80s, who applied rational choice theory (partial equilibrium optimization, game theory, etc.) to issues like crime and marriage that had traditionally been the domain of sociology. By the turn of the century, economists were brashly  trumpeting their...