Matt Nolan

Upcoming blog changes

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Hi everyone.  You may have noticed a flurry of activity in the blog over the last two weeks – this is because I moved two months of planned activity forward so it would be finished by the end of September.

I am going to have to leave the blog for a while in order to focus my attention on other things from today – so for the foreseeable future I will not be writing or commenting here.

However, some students at Victoria University of Wellington have stated that they are keen to set up an Economic Club at Victoria.  As part of this some students are likely to put up posts here – giving the blog a fresh start with some new, more novel, voices.  Once the club is set up there will likely be a post here – you don’t have to be a student to join, and I hear they are looking at setting up monthly presentations from economists on a range of topical issues.

I have had a lot of fun writing here again, and I’m sure that one day I’ll have something to say.  But I like the idea that some Young (Economics) Turks will turn up to disrupt economic thinking on this site – and hopefully help us all think a bit more critically about economics ideas we’ve taken as given.

Matt Nolan

Good tweet on narratives and morality

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Make of this what you will.  I think reading it as Smith underplaying morality is unfair – but reading it as economic language/narratives being used to underplay important moral arguments that may be necessary for important coordination games is fair.

When I was recently asked who my favourite economist was I named my partner, but pointed out Tirole was a close second.  I also discovered my third fav, Dixon, is on twitter.  Both Tirole and Dixon use standard economics models to explain things we observe while focusing on the types of assumptions we make and their credibility – they use models for clarity of exposition, and I love it.