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I like the influence that physicists are having on economics. Moving towards agent-based modelling in some areas of the discipline is a great idea. But, in addition to lending their novel insights, some seem to enjoy piling on economics generally. Generally you have to take the good with the bad but Mark Buchanan’s latest article is so shockingly bad that I can’t help picking on it. Read more
Let us see if we can get a little bit of ethics going:
“Social good” is a philosophically unsound notion, made up by economists and policy wonks to justify their own existence.
Once again, remember that these are points for discussion – I am not saying I agree or disagree with them.
Wow. What a roller-coaster ride that was. The lead changed hands countless times (as I wasn’t counting), but in the end our sexiest economist poll did have an outright winner.
It is my privilege to announce that the deserved winner of the 2014 New Zealand sexiest economist competition was Read more
Last month I noticed a piece from the IMF “redistribution, inequality, and growth”. It came out after my post on “Okun’s leaky bucket” and I was pretty happy to see the piece – as it was actual empirical research stating that the policy trade-offs are more complicated than some grand “equality vs efficiency” policy choice. As they say in their introduction:
It must be borne in mind that the data are particularly scarce and unreliable for redistribution, even more so than for inequality. Indeed, one possible interpretation of our results is that the data on redistribution simply do not contain enough information to infer a negative (or for that matter a positive) direct effect.
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We should of course be cautious about drawing definitive policy implications from cross-country regression analysis. We know that different sorts of policies are likely to have different effects in different countries at different times.
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What we find is that we should not assume that there is a big trade-off between redistribution and growth