Month: October 2007

It is rare that an Op-Ed is written praising an economist.  It makes many good points but there is one unjustified slap:

Goolsbee no doubt has lots of dubious ideas — he is, after all, a Democrat — about how government can creatively fiddle with the market’s allocation of wealth and opportunity.

Does the use of "no doubt" mean Will actually knows this?  But the next sentence comes and the piece closes on a different note altogether:

…he seems to be the sort of person — amiable, empirical and reasonable — you would want at the elbow of a Democratic president, if such there must be.

There’s a hot market for demilitarized ICBM silos. There are three of
them on offer at eBay right now, with the asking price of $500,000 per
silo, which includes underground and above ground support facilities.
Hundreds of ICBM silos have been sold off in the last twenty years, as
new missile forces were reduced with the end of the Cold War, and the
enactment of arms reduction treaties.  Most of these are located in
remote areas.  For example, the three silo complex being offered on eBay
sits on 57 acres in central Washington State.

Here is further information. 

And while we are on the markets in everything topic, here is what Indians will do for you (if you pay them).

And here is a New Zealand market: lingerie for men (TC: clicking on this site is a mistake, please don’t do it, if only to avoid the music), who said small population and fixed costs limit product diversity (though they do ship by mail, how much of their business is Kiwi)? 

Thanks to several loyal MR readers for the pointers, at least one of them may wish to remain anonymous.

I tend to listen to NPR while showering, and really enjoyed this morning’s interview with Robert Frank.  The interview draws heavily from his book, The Economic Naturalist – previous blogged about by Tyler, here and here.

Robert Frank’s observations on economics teaching will fundamentally change what I do in the classroom.  What he has to say is important.  Read it.  Here.

Yes, this was previously covered on MR (here and here).  But I am intrigued by Frank’s ambition in arguing that we need to emphasize the "deep" concepts of economics in a way that transforms how our students see the world.  We econ profs probably fail, and it is hard to see how to do better.  But it is worth doing.

Perhaps blogs like Marginal Revolution help one better see the world through an economists lens.  But most econ profs teach in the classroom, not the blogosphere, and so I want to ask: How can we do a better job teaching what is important, true and beautiful in economics? Comments open.  But a request: Please only comment if you have taken the time to read the Frank piece (this one).

…a group of economists at George Mason University, and other
prominent researchers, say this notion of a free-market mainstream is
oversimplified at best and inaccurate at worst.

“There’s really not any data, and there’s a caricature, that
economists are extremely free market,” said Tyler Cowen, a professor of
economics at George Mason who is popular in free-market and libertarian
circles. “I think the differences are overdrawn.”

My colleague Daniel Klein, the central focus of this article, has shown that economists’ views are quite mainstream and often closely aligned with the Democratic Party:

And Klein has numbers to back up his claims. Some of those numbers come in the form of party donations, similar to studies (some of which have also been done by Klein at George Mason) purporting to show political bias among professors in academe: For example, one Econ Journal Watch study
found a 5.1 to 1 ratio between contributors to the Democratic versus
Republican party among a sample of 2,000 members of the AEA. Klein
found similar lopsidedness in the authors and editors of journals
(including the Journal of Economic Literature) and even within the groups of people listed in authors’ acknowledgments in journal articles.

Read the whole thing, which also includes a debunking of the notion of heterodox economics.  Often the real dissent in economics comes from the free market side; left-wing heterodoxy is more aligned with the mainstream than it cares to admit.  The piece closes with some me:

“So, everyone in a debate always wants to call the other side
ideologues, essentially, and the critics of economics are doing that
here,” Cowen explained. “They like to think they’re on the outside,
there’s something new, they’re warring against some powerful authority.”

About theories that run counter to the neoclassical model, he said, “It’s a view that’s been with us for centuries.”

Probably influenced by Tyler’s post on Radiohead, my last post ended by providing computer code for "regression-heads" to replicate some numbers.  But what is the right term for those I just called (affectionately) regression-heads?

1. Ian Ayres would call you a Super Cruncher
2. Steve Levitt would suggest you are a Freakonomist
3. If this were the Society for American Baseball Research you would be a Sabermetrician
4. Our friends in finance would call you a quant.

Perhaps readers of this blog are Marginal Revolters?  Other ideas?

(Yes, I’ve heard Econometrician.)