Hello New Zealand readers. Just giving you a heads up that tomorrow (Thursday, 23 October) there is a panel discussion on the Piketty book (Capital in the Twenty-First Century) and its relevance to New Zealand. As I contributed to the related book of book reviews, and as this particular event is in Wellington (where I […]
From Noah Smith on Twitter: There are models economists make to describe what they think is really going on, and there are models they make to explore neat ideas. — Noah Smith (@Noahpinion) October 9, 2014 My question to you fine folk, are both types of models useful? If so how?
Via Ryan Decker on Twitter: Pundits want equal status to econs, hence the argument MT @ModeledBehavior enough w/ claims that econ unscientific http://t.co/2rDxQOKyRj … — Ryan Decker (@UpdatedPriors) September 28, 2014
Today, let us discuss the conclusion from this post about language and Piketty: The language of economics often treats people as commodities: the phrases “representative agent” and “human capital” are examples of this. Sometimes these phrases are useful abstractions, but they also contribute to the sometimes pernicious indifference of mainstream economics to issues of […]
I was chatting about some policy recently with another economist, when they came out with this great line about how some policy was being reported (overseas): Every political editor loves it and all the economics editors are unimpressed. What does this mean? What does this imply about politics and economics? I’ll leave it up to […]
There have been blog posts about centre-Green parties (on TVHE here, here, here), I’m a bit fatigued with politics right now and want to focus on my research so I don’t want to get into that. One thing I keep hearing, repeatedly, about a centre-Green party is that it doesn’t make sense because it involves […]