David Leonardt polls the AEA meetings and reports. Of course all but one or two of these names already have been covered on MR…
Who’s Hot and Who’s Not
Previous post: The real questions behind global warming
Next post: Visited countries
Our Books
Modern Principles of Economics
Launching The Innovation Renaissance
The Great Stagnation: How America Ate All the Low-Hanging Fruit of Modern History, Got Sick, and Will(Eventually) Feel Better
Create Your Own Economy: The Path to Prosperity in a Disordered World
Discover Your Inner Economist
Good and Plenty: The Creative Successes of American Arts Funding
Judge and Jury: American Tort Law on Trial
Markets and Cultural Voices: Liberty vs. Power in the Lives of Mexican Amate Painters (Economics, Cognition, and Society)
The Voluntary City: Choice, Community, and Civil Society (Economics, Cognition, and Society)
Creative Destruction: How Globalization Is Changing the World's Cultures
Changing the Guard: Private Prisons and the Control of Crime
What Price Fame?
In Praise of Commercial Culture
Entrepreneurial Economics: Bright Ideas from the Dismal Science
Contact Us
When does a “young” economist become an “old” economist? The article lists ages of 2 of the 13, 26 and 41.
I counted seven names: Oster, Shapiro, Chetty, Gruber, Leavitt,
Murphy, and somebody else (forget). Murphy is getting a bit
long in the tooth to be labeled “young” anymore. He got his
J.B. Clark award quite some time ago.
Want to enlighten us by link or list on the rest of them, please?
In many ways “economics” over the last 60 years has contributed more to the _misunderstanding_ of human behavior and human interaction than it has toward the understanding of these. More fundamentally, “economics” has misconstrued the overall problem of economics order to be explained, and it has utterly failed to make sense of it’s “tools” in providing a sound causal explanation for that order. There is a huge literature on this.
Mr. Leonhardt says “But economists have been acting a lot like intellectual imperialists in the last decade or so.” He must be very young: economists were accused of being imperialists in the 1970s. Actually, they were very successful imperialists. In the 1990s, the imperialists started to pay attention to the new territories they had conquered and to take advantage of natives’ theoretical and empirical research. Today most economists do no longer care about discipline lines.
He also claims that “… esoteric fiscal and monetary models that once dominated economics.” Before 1990, there were many fiscal and monetary models but, thanks God, they never dominated economics. Mr. Leonhardt seems to think that before 2000, economics used to be only macroeconomics.
Finally, in the last paragraph of his articule, Mr. Leonhard says “But think about what scientists do when they uncover a problem: they try to solve it.” He seems to think scientists are like engineers. He’s wrong about scientists (they try to understand and explain “problems”, not to solve them), although many have argued that economists should be like engineers rather than scientists (an idea criticized by J. Buchanan in the early 1960′s).
Leonhardt really does seem pretty clueless about what has gone on in the field. And his idea of the economist as social worker is a pretty narrow one. It is true, though, that economists have historically been reformers of various sorts.
RWP, it would be great if there existed a single coherent explanatory strategy called “the economic way of thinking”, but facts betray the the official ideology of the profession. Any good book in the history of economic thought over the last 75 years would disabuse you of this illusion.
Comments on this entry are closed.