QOTD: What is economics?
From Twitter, but originally the Samuelson and Nordhaus text – based on a phrase from Alfred Marshall – is beautiful:
<3
Good tweet on narratives and morality
"It is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer, or the baker that we expect our dinner"
– Adam Smith"Narratives compete with imperatives (general moral rules or precepts)…to persuade agents to behave in desirable ways."
– Jean Tirolehttps://t.co/YdVGjsh84U— Noah Smith (@Noahpinion) September 22, 2018
Make of this what you will. I think reading it as Smith underplaying morality is unfair – but reading it as economic language/narratives being used to underplay important moral arguments that may be necessary for important coordination games is fair.
When I was recently asked who my favourite economist was I named my partner, but pointed out Tirole was a close second. I also discovered my third fav, Dixon, is on twitter. Both Tirole and Dixon use standard economics models to explain things we observe while focusing on the types of assumptions we make and their credibility – they use models for clarity of exposition, and I love it.
Incentives: parenting tweet edition
This from @JustinWolfers is in the running for tweet of the year:
My 5-year old just warned me that if I don't behave myself the consequence will be “No economics for a week.” I'm cleaning up my act.
— Justin Wolfers (@JustinWolfers) March 3, 2015
QOTD: On politics and economics
I was chatting about some policy recently with another economist, when they came out with this great line about how some policy was being reported (overseas):
Every political editor loves it and all the economics editors are unimpressed.
What does this mean? What does this imply about politics and economics? I’ll leave it up to you to discuss that – I’ll just giggle 😉
Discussion Tuesday
From some lecture notes by David Autor:
It’s nearly impossible to overstate the value that economists ascribe to cleverness. (Like most obsessions, this one is not altogether healthy.)
QOTD: Andrew Dickson and Bill Kaye-Blake
While the blog was out of action I noticed a lot of people linking the following article by Andrew Dickson and Bill Kaye-Blake (from Groping to Bethlehem).
All the links focused on how the article made the case for a tax on sugar. That is fine and all, it was an externality case that we can discuss, appeal to evidence and value judgments on, and then decide whether we agree or not. In fact, I get the impression that is the exact point that the authors are raising after setting up the pro-argument.
However, I didn’t get the impression that many people made it to the second half of the article (given the way it was used) – and the second half was absolutely glorious.
The second half starts with this: Read more