faulker020

Chris Arnade got a PhD in theoretical physics, became a bond trader, and then became a photographer who documents drug addiction. He frequently writes on Twitter and elsewhere about social problems. Recently, he wrote a tweetstorm (series of threaded tweets) about his interpretation of Trumpism . I think Chris leaves out a lot of the reasons for Trump support - xenophobia, fear of racial conflict, misplaced nostalgia. I also doubt that the drug addicts that Chris spends his life documenting tend to be Trump supporters. But I think Chris makes some really good points when he writes: Many people have no chance & they know it & reminded of it daily. On TV, on the web. They see what they are missing. And who is winning...The response to this is, we all have Iphones now. Everyone has all this stuff they never had before...Response 1: Maybe when we measure someone by how much stuff they have, those at bottom will never be happy. Because others have far more...Response 2: Maybe trying...

In a lot of debates about economic methodology, someone will bring up Milton Friedman's "pool player" analogy. The pool player analogy was part of Milton Friedman's rationale for modeling the behavior of economic agents (consumers, firms, etc.) as the optimization of some objective function. Unfortunately, the analogy is A) not that good in the first place, and B) frequently misapplied to make excuses for models that don't match data. Here's the original analogy: Consider the problem of predicting the shots made by an expert billiard player. It seems not at all unreasonable that excellent predictions would be yielded by the hypothesis that the billiard player made his shots as if he knew the complicated mathematical formulas that would give the optimum directions of travel, could estimate accurately by eye the angles, etc., describing the location of the balls, could make lightning calculations from the formulas, and could then make the balls travel in the di...

I don't expend much effort dissing macroeconomics these days, but every once in a while it's good to give people a reminder. I wrote a Bloomberg post about how academic macro (or more accurately, mainstream macro theory) has not really helped out the finance industry, the Fed, or coffee house discussions. The reason, as Justin Wolfers recently pointed out , is basically that DSGE models don't work. Brad DeLong then wrote a post riffing on mine , which is excellent and which you should read. A super-fun Twitter discussion then followed, part of which Brad storified for posterity . But that leaves the question: Assuming Wolfers and DeLong and I aren't just blowing smoke out of our rear ends, and DSGE models really don't work, why do so many macroeconomists spend so much time on them? One obvious hypothesis is that a huge percent of their human capital is already invested in knowing how to do this technique, so they just keep doing what they know how to do, and teachi...

The Washington Post has a long story  by Jim Tankersley about Charles' Koch's attempt to influence the economics profession with massive donations of money to large numbers of universities. Here are some excerpts: Koch’s donations have fueled the expansion of a branch of economic research that aligns closely with his personal beliefs of how markets work best: with strong personal freedom and limited government intervention.  They have seeded research centers, professors and graduate students devoted to the study of free enterprise, who often provide the intellectual foundation for legislation seeking to reduce regulations and taxes...  From 2012 through 2014 alone, his charitable arm, the Charles Koch Foundation, donated $64 million to university programs. A tax filing from 2013 lists more than 250 schools, departments or programs that received grants from the foundation, in amounts that ranged from a few thousand dollars to more than $10 million at George Mason Universit...

Josh Hendrickson's Twitter account is @RebelEconProf, and his blog is The Everyday Economist. So if both these names are accurate, I can only assume that Josh adheres to Mao's theory of Perpetual Revolution ! That has nothing to do with this post, I just always wanted to say that. What this post is really about is that Josh wrote a post about my Bloomberg post about Econ 101! So I decided to write a counter-rebuttal post. Hmm. OK, let's back up. I have two basic criticisms related to Econ 101: 1. I think 101 classes don't include enough empirics . 2. I think 101 models often get misapplied in public discussions , a phenomenon I call "101ism". Josh is arguing about (1). I think. Mostly. But I think he doesn't always quite get what I'm saying. Therefore, I will do - you guessed it! - a point-by-point response. You know you love em. Josh : Noah Smith’s dislike of Econ 101 seems to come from the discussion of the minimum wage.  Not really, no. That's...

I've been having a fairly epic email argument with a lefty* social scientist friend, about whether social science can give us objective knowledge about the world. Apparently, it has become accepted in lefty* social science and humanities circles that the study of human beings is an inherently subjective enterprise, and will never yield the kind of knowledge delivered by physics, chemistry, biology, etc. There are essentially three arguments for this. Paraphrasing heavily: 1) Social science has policy implications, and so ideological bias will always leak in, affecting both researchers' methodological choices and their interpretations of conclusions. 2) Social phenomena are highly complex, and hence can never be understood in the way natural phenomena can be. 3) Social science = humans studying other humans, and "reflexivity" prevents us from understanding ourselves in the same way we could understand the behavior of ants or atoms. I think all that each of these argume...