2. New economics blog, 10cc
3. A British poll of artists’ favorite painters
5. Why most people don’t get economics
6. What economists agree upon, summarized by Greg Mankiw
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I found “5. Why most people don’t get economics” very interesting. Is this well-received by economists?
(btw, s/cc/cm)
A comment on the last sentence of “Why most people don’t get economics”.
“In other words, to have an intuitive grasp of economics, you might just need to take a step or two up the evolutionary ladder.”
Does this mean economists are higher level beings or are the rest of us just sub-human?
Contrary to what the dog article says, I believe that the size differential between the very largest and very smallest horses is similar to that between Great Danes and Chihuahuas.
#5 Doesn’t Arnold Kling have an entire chapter about that, covering the same exact relationships, in his book, Learning Economics?
Herr Cowen,
The Alan Fiske study: Best damn thing I’ve read today.
“artists’ favorite painters” – but they forgot Thomas Kinkade, painter of light!
From the Fiske article:
“To call this a far-reaching theory is probably a gross understatement. The more I think about it, the more it seems to fit and explain.”
…which should tell you that the theory is poor. But what could you expect from an anthropologist?
Steven Pinker has nice discussion of Fiske’s theory in ‘The Blank Slate’ — it starts on page 233, and you can read it by using the Amazon ‘search inside this book’ feature and searching for ‘Fiske’. Pinker’s emphasis is a bit different. In his retelling, the real problem seems to be the conflict between ‘equity matching’ and ‘market pricing’. According to Pinker, equity matching is implicated in the ‘physical fallacy’–the supposedly intuitive idea that goods have a fixed, unchanging value and, therefore, a ‘fair price’ beyond which it is unethical to charge. Pinker argues that ‘market pricing’ (the idea that goods have no fixed value other than what is determined by supply and demand) is a new phenomenon that cannot have been ingrained into human psychology during evolutionary times, and so we struggle with it.
It’s a neat argument, but I’m skeptical, and here’s why. Hunter-gatherers, in fact, encountered value varying with supply and demand quite often. For example, in times when game is plentiful, the value of meat is lower and the hunter can not expect so much in trade. But when game is scarce, the value of meat is very high. That’s market pricing in action, and everybody grasps it intuitively. The problem, I think, comes in expectations about what the hunter should do with his meat when game is scarce. Is it ethical for him to drive the hardest possible bargain? It seems that nearly all societies agree that the answer is no (and perhaps this is wired into our psychology as well) — people seem to instinctively hate ‘profiteers’. Not because they don’t recognize that the value of goods varies with scarcity–but in spite of the fact that they do. It makes things rather complicated.
(by this, I meant point 5)
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thanks admin
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