Wellington Regional Council have recently published their Genuine Progress Indicator, which is intended to measure changes in regional well-being. Measuring well-being is very difficult and the technical documentation provided by the WRC shows how hard they have found it to overcome the challenges. The GPI has been constructed by taking about 100 variables of relevance […]
Nick Rowe is concerned that agent-based modelling (ABM) is a black box that provides no intuition and doesn’t really add to our knowledge: Agent-based models, or any computer simulations, strike me as being a bit like [a] black box. A paper written by a very reliable economist where all the middle pages are missing and […]
Apparently some historians want their discipline to become a predictive science. Because that worked out so well for economics back in the 60s. What is needed is a systematic application of the scientific method to history: verbal theories should be translated into mathematical models, precise predictions derived, and then rigorously tested on empirical material. In […]
Tyler Cowen and Kevin Grier make some predictions: Medal totals will become more diversified over time. The market share of the “top 10” countries will continue to fall (it was 81 percent in 1988) as economic and population growth slows in the rich world. The developing world has greater room for rapid economic growth, and […]
If you read this blog you’ve probably heard of Acemoglu, Johnson, and Robinson’s (AJR) work on development economics. You may even have read their magnum opus (minus Johnson), Why Nations Fail, and if you haven’t then I highly recommend it. They’ve also started a great blog to support the book. But even better than that, […]
Paul Krugman explaining the IS-LM model: [T]he first thing you need to know is that there are multiple correct ways of explaining IS-LM. That’s because it’s a model of several interacting markets, and you can enter from multiple directions, any one of which is a valid starting point. Which beautifully illustrates this point: There seem […]