faulker020

The U.S. and Europe are in a time of great political change. Policies haven't changed that much yet, but the set of ideas that drive movements and activism and the public discussion have altered radically in the last few years. In the U.S., which of course I know the best, there have been new outpourings on the left - the resurgent socialist movement and the social justice movement chief among them. But as far as I can see, the biggest new thing is the alt-right. Loosely (we can argue about definitions all day, and I'm sure many of you will want to do so), the alt-right wants to make American society homogeneous. Most of the enthusiasm is for racial homogeneity, but religion seems to figure into it a bit as well. The siren song of homogeneity is a powerful one. On Twitter and elsewhere, I am encountering more and more young people (mostly men) who openly yearn for a society where everyone is white. The more reasonable among these young people tell me that homogeneity reduces co...

A lot of people have trouble wrapping their heads around the idea that the basic "Econ 101" model - the undifferentiated, single-market supply-and-demand model - doesn't work for labor markets . To some people involved in debates over labor policy, the theory is almost axiomatic - the labor market must be describable in terms of a "labor supply curve" and a "labor demand curve". If you tell them it can't, it just sort of breaks their brain. How could there not be a labor demand curve? How could there not be a relationship between the price of something and how much of it people want to buy? Answer: If you can't observe it, you might as well treat it as if it doesn't exist. People forget this, but demand curves aren't actually directly observable. They're hypotheticals - "If the price were X, how much would you buy?" You can give people a survey, but the only way to really know how much people would buy is to actually m...

I really like this defense of macroeconomics by Ricardo Reis. He makes it clear that he's sort of playing devil's advocate here: While preparing for this article, I read many of the recent essays on macroeconomics and its future. I agree with much of what is in them, and benefit from having other people reflect about economists and the progress in the field. But to join a debate on what is wrong with economics by adding what is wronger with economics is not terribly useful. In turn, it would have been easy to share my thoughts on how macroeconomic research should change, which is, unsurprisingly, in the direction of my own research. I could have insisted that macroeconomics has over-relied on rational expectations even though there are at least a couple of well developed, tractable, and disciplined alternatives. I could have pleaded for research on fiscal policy to move away from the over-study of what was the spending of the past (purchases) and to focus instead on the spendi...

In my last post, I recounted some historical examples of times when (broadly defined) rationalist communities - groups of smart generalists debating and trying to figure things out - changed the world. A number of people noted that my examples are all from the fairly distant past, and have asked whether similar changes are possible today.  Well first of all, I think there's a selection bias at work in our assessment of who "changed the world". The Royal Society looks world-changing now, but in its day it probably just looked like a bunch of eccentric tinkerers and nerds. It took centuries of progress, based on the foundations discovered in the 17th century, for those contributions to be properly recognized as world-shaking.  Second, I think whether groups are able to make big changes, especially in the social sciences, depends in large part on external events - i.e., whether there are big political changes happening at the time, for other reasons. The Meirokusha came alon...

Defending the "rationalist" community from its most recent crop of assailants, Scott Alexander writes : There have been past paradigms for which...criticisms [of rationality] are pretty fair. I think especially of the late-19th/early-20th century Progressive movement. Sidney and Beatrice Webb, Le Corbusier, George Bernard Shaw, Marx and the Soviets, the Behaviorists, and all the rest. Even the early days of our own movement on Overcoming Bias and Less Wrong had a lot of this.  But notice [I posted] links...to book reviews, by me, of books studying those people and how they went wrong. So consider the possibility that the rationalist community has a plan somewhat more interesting than just “remain blissfully unaware of past failures and continue to repeat them again and again”...  Look. I’m the last person who’s going to deny that the road we’re on is littered with the skulls of the people who tried to do this before us. But we’ve noticed the skulls. We’ve looked at the creep...