Bluematter quotes Alfred Marshall: (1) Use mathematics as shorthand language, rather than as an engine of inquiry. (2) Keep to them till you have done. (3) Translate into English. (4) Then illustrate by examples that are important in real life (5) Burn the mathematics. (6) If you can’t succeed in 4, burn 3. This I […]
Matt’s post on equity and efficiency reminds me of a paper by Greg Mankiw and Matthew Weinzierl on optimal taxation. The idea is as follows. Suppose that we think equity means a society where everyone has the opportunity to earn income proportional to the effort that they exert. The hardest workers are those who succeed […]
As much as I hate link farmers, I can’t help reposting this great paragraph from the Positive Economist. It just ties in so well to the recent discussion on this blog about rationality and behavioural economics! Behavioral economics is possibly the least revolutionary revolution ever to hit an academic discipline, because, as Scheiber is alluding […]
I’ve been bombarded recently with people telling me about economists’ perception of rationality and the wonders of behavioural economics. The term homo economicus gets thrown around with gay abandon as a generic criticism of economics. Oliver Woods claimed that rationality means having perfect information and being entirely self-interested. At the other end of the scale, […]
You always here about how biased referees are from football fans. However, Matt and Agnitio are model football fans and seem to rarely criticise the referee, even when Liverpool are getting walloped. Now Robin Hanson links to a study which gives them a reason to lambast the ref a bit more: Referees, who are appointed […]
Over at NZQuest, Oliver Woods claims that economics …works around perfect conditions and universal application of models and theories developed many years ago to any economic problem, believing history, society and all sorts of other factors undermine the ‘homo economicus’, or the supposedly rational profit-driven man who thinks entirely in his own self-interest and only […]