faulker020

The other day I wrote a Bloomberg View post about how California is waking up to the problem of NIMBYism - development restrictions that limit economic activity and make cities less affordable. Ground Zero for this struggle is the Bay Area, San Francisco in particular. The pro-development activists known as the YIMBYs have been at the forefront of the fight. Economists have also been weighing in.  Enrico Moretti & Chang-Tai Hsieh  and Andrii Parkomenko have both come out with new theory papers showing negative impacts of housing development restrictions. Ed Glaeser and Joe Gyourko have a paper reaching similar conclusions after looking at data, theory, and institutional and legal details. And Richard Florida has a whole new book about the problem . But the YIMBYs have faced a great deal of intellectual pushback from certain folks in the Bay Area. Even as I was writing my post, physicist Phil Price was writing an impassioned attack on YIMBYism over at Andrew Gelman's bl...

I don't know why academic literatures are so often referred to as "vast" (the phrase goes back well over a century ), but it seems like no matter what topic you talk about, someone is always popping up to inform you that there is a "vast literature" on the topic already. This often serves to shut down debate, because it amounts to a demand that before you talk about something, you need to go read voluminous amounts of what others have already written about it. Since vast literatures take many, many hours to read, this represents a significant demand of time and effort. If the vast literature comprises 40 papers, each of which takes an hour to read, that's one week of full-time work equivalent that people are demanding as a cost of entry just to participate in a debate! So the question is: Is it worth it? Often, reading the literature seems like an eminently reasonable demand. Suppose I were to think about minimum wage for the first time, knowing nothing abou...

Scott Alexander has a post with some pretty spectacular smackdowns of Silicon Valley's more exuberant critics. Some excerpts: While Deadspin was busy calling Silicon Valley “awful nightmare trash parasites”, my girlfriend in Silicon Valley was working for a company developing a structured-light optical engine to manipulate single cells and speed up high-precision biological research.  While FastCoDesign was busy calling Juicero “a symbol of the Silicon Valley class designing for its own, insular problems,” a bunch of my friends in Silicon Valley were working for Wave, a company that helps immigrants send remittances to their families in East Africa..  While Gizmodo was busy writing that this “is not an isolated quirk” because Silicon Valley investors “don’t care that they do not solve problems [and] exist to temporarily excite the affluent into spending money”, Silicon Valley investors were investing $35 million into an artificial pancreas for diabetics.  While Fredd...

In response to the empirical revolution in econ, and especially to the rise of quasi-experimental methods , a lot of older economists are naturally sticking up for theory. For example, here's Dan Hamermesh , reviewing Dani Rodrik's "Economics Rules": Economics Rules notes with some approbation the rise of concern among applied economists, and especially labor economists, about causality. It fails, though, to observe that this newfound concentration has been accompanied, as Jeff Biddle and I show ( History of Political  Economy , forthcoming 2017), by diminished attention to model-building and to the use of models, which Rodrik rightly views as the centerpiece of economic research. He recognizes, however, that the “causation über alles ” approach (my term, not Rodrik’s) has made research in labor economics increasingly time- and place-specific. To a greater extent than in model-based research, our findings are likely to be less broadly applicable than those in the ar...