faulker020

Last year I wrote a post called " Do economists have physics envy? ". Historian Philip Mirowski (who I notice also got his econ PhD from Michigan!), who literally wrote the book on the interplay between economics and physics, is not too happy with my post. In a recent interview , he explains why: Let’s take a recent example of a popular contemporary economist blogger, insisting that economists don’t suffer from physics envy. Instead of looking at the history, or the technical issues involved, he just blurts out some random impressions: economists make more money than physicists (I cannot make this stuff up); an economist can talk about how much progress physicists are likely to make, and get taken seriously, but not vice versa (ditto); economic theorists, traditionally, have been free from the constraints of empirical validation (note the total innocence of the history of empiricism in economics); and that equilibrium means something different in economics than in physics.The l...

There's a new website called Evonomics devoted to critiquing the economics discipline. They've got quite a lot of interesting writers and advisors, including (but not limited to) Paul Krugman, Joe Stiglitz, George Akerlof, Robert Shiller, David Colander, Jonathan Haidt, Yanis Varoufakis, David Sloan Wilson, and many more. The site appears to be attracting a ton of traffic - there's a large appetite out there for critiques of economics. In any case, I noticed David Sloan Wilson is writing a series of posts criticizing econ as a whole, and I thought I'd go through one of them and see what I thought was right, and what I thought was wrong. Wilson can get a little grandiose, likening the econ profession to the orcs of Mordor and himself to Frodo. But let's look past that and talk about the substance. Here are a few points in Wilson's essay that I don't completely agree with. Wilson: Economists were very smart, very powerful, and they spoke a language that I d...

I noticed today that the user "Ricky Vaughn" has been kicked off of Twitter . "Ricky" was a key figure in the alt-right on Twitter, which means that he was a proponent of white-nationalism. He thought that nonwhite immigration is ruining America, that it should be stopped, that there are all kinds of natural differences between races, etc. etc. I had a long and pretty civil discussion with Ricky about a year ago, about immigration, etc. I eventually blocked him, not because of anything he did, but because when he replied to or retweeted me it would result in my mentions getting flooded by a hundred screeching Nazis yelling "get in my oven", etc. I just don't have time for that stuff. Anyway, Ricky has been booted, just as Milo Yiannopolous was booted . The moves echo a general move by conversation platforms to crack down on alt-right harassment - Reddit's banning of the "gas the kikes" subreddit and 4chan's crackdown on GamerGate a...

1. Why is Rational Expectations still around, anyway?  Rational Expectations is (are?) one of the key features of almost every macro model in existence today, and has been for decades. Why? One reason is that it's easy to work with, mathematically - just stick an "E" in front of things, and voila, that's what the agents in your model believe! Another reason is that RE is appealing to folks who think that the government shouldn't be able to trick people consistently. A third reason is that there's just no obvious alternative way of modeling expectations. Classic alternatives like adaptive expectations are rigid, simplistic, and just generally very weak. And more sophisticated alternatives , besides being unwieldy to model, also tend to be hyper-specific - if there are actually a number of different ways that RE fails, each of these models will only catch one of them. But the real reason is that it's hard to test people's expectations directly . Instead...