When tech companies were torturing their interviewees with questions like ‘why are manholes round?’ there was much fawning over the way they got people to think on their feet. Now Google’s HR boss says that those questions were all a waste of time: brainteasers are a complete waste of time. How many golf balls can […]
Back in 1087 Robert Solow quipped that “You can see the computer age everywhere but in the productivity statistics.” With the increasingly integral use of computers in schools, some researchers asked whether you can see it in the pupil achievement figures. Apparently not… Computers are an important part of modern education, yet many schoolchildren lack […]
A lot of things in economic models are ‘exogenous’ and outside our usual frame of investigation. Not just little, unimportant things but big things, too: innovation and technological change, recessions, bubbles in markets. On some reading of economic models each of these things is unknowable and unpredictable. Obviously that’s far from satisfactory and lots of […]
It’s the rule, writes Christy Romer: The regime shift we are seeing in Japan is just the kind of bold action that might actually succeed in changing both inflation and growth expectations a substantial amount. As a result, it may be an effective tool for encouraging robust recovery and an end to deflation. Nick Rowe […]
In the aftermath of the Reinhart/Rogoff fiasco, Dani Rodrik has called for economists to stick to their knitting: …economists [should not] second-guess how their ideas will be used or misused in public debate and shade their public statements accordingly. …few economists are sufficiently well attuned to have a clear idea of how the politics will […]
We’ve all met hardened cynics in our professional lives. Those people who think the worst of those they meet at every turn because they’ve been burned so many times. They give nobody the benefit of the doubt and look down on new staff for their hopelessly naivety and gullibility. The question posed by a group […]