Archive for category: Other

Matt has written a long post discussing Rosenberg and Curtain’s NYT article about the science of economics. Their basic point is that economics has a poor forecasting record so it’s not a science and we should just treat it as a useful art. Matt’s response engages directly with the philosophy of science but I think an interesting perspective is raised by Paul Krugman in his reply. He first points out that economists’ models have actually performed very well throughout the crisis and Bernanke is far from an artist:

…far from acting as a free-spirited improviser, Bernanke has been largely implementing recipes developed in the academic literature years before.

These are easy points to score against the philosophers, who appear completely clueless about economics. Worse, they spend all their time attacking the strawman of logical positivism, which has never really described the way economists or other scientists actually work. But I’m going to leave that argument to Matt because I think, in one key respect, Paul Krugman goes too far. Read more

They sound fancy and complex but this is a good explanation from XKCD. What I really like about it is that it emphasises how competition among networks is not unambiguously beneficial to consumers. For more on network effects and why they’re not the same as externalities check out the Palgrave description.

I see that Offsetting Behaviour has already beaten me to it, but in case you haven’t seen it I’d like to warmly introduce Shamubeel Eaqub as a new TVHE contributor.  He is joining Agnitio, Goonix, James, and Myself as “potentially regular writers” – which implies having the ability to just write something on here whenever we get the itch.

Most of our readers will already know Shamubeel – he is a Principal Economist at NZIER, and has expended a lot of effort discussing and communicating economic ideas in public in recent years. I have no doubt he’ll introduce his own style, and set of interests, into the pool of TVHE posts – and we’ll all be much better off for it.

The fact he works at NZIER of course makes him an ex-workmate of James and a bitter competitor to me – but even so I’m pretty excited about his contributions to the discussion here!

He has already posted on National’s housing policy and discussing creative destruction with reference to Blackberry phones – although not in this way.

I like to think that Shamubeel was keen to join us after his strong performance in the “sexiest economist” competition, coming in fourth place.  Perhaps by entering the econoblogsphere he’ll be able to egg up enough support to break into the top three next time?