Matt Nolan

Discussion Tuesday

/in /by

Today just a quote from someone I was talking to:

I used to think I hated just economists due to their arrogance, the arrogance of knowing about the social and economic world.  It turns out I hate everyone as, as everyone seems to believe they know how the world works and how to fix it.

It is a general sentiment (around knowledge) that I agree with – although the hatred is unnecessary.  In truth, my view is that it is undue confidence about our own folk model of the economy/society is part of human nature – accepting we know a lot less, and trying to make our statements around policy transparent and testable, would be neat things.  In my view this is what good “economics” involves.

Matt Nolan

Discussion Tuesday

/8 Comments/in /by

Let us fully outsource this one to twitter!

Given my Garmin watch which syncs to Strava and Runtastic, and my Fitbit pedometer that sits on the other arm – and the fact that I connect these to MyFitnessPal where I log my food via my cellphone, I sort of see where he is coming from.  I love my shiny online badges.  Furthermore, I believe there is a term for this type of behavioural effect (which acts both as incentive and a form of precommitment depending on its design) – gamification.

Matt Nolan

What econs do

/in /by

Recently on twitter I decided to write a bunch of acronyms.  In my defence I noted:

Now a couple of points were left unsaid here.  What is the other 65% and how did I get my data.

The other 65% falls into three categories.  15% is made up of using esoteric terms to describe often obvious social phenomenon.  Another 10% is made up of using metaphors as a way of communicating these esoteric terms.  And the final 40% is mentioning data points.

The data set used to decompose what economists do into these categories is an unbalanced panel from the last 7 years.  Given selection bias in my sample and the fuzziness of quantifying what fits into certain categories I used a bit of calibration (to fit the data to known population parameters), smoothing, hedonic adjustment, and judgement to adjust the data.

In other terms I made it up.

Proper posts will be back soon – I have been working on posts about NZ election policies.  They won’t be that detailed, but hopefully they will be of interest.

Matt Nolan

Woops

/in /by

I have just accidentally purchased 6 books on methodology, mostly economics but one from sociology and one general philosophy of science book.  As I’m supposed to be estimating a whole lot of things at the moment, this combined with these new books may leave me a little quiet …

Hopefully I can get up from my slumber to write about the election during the weekend (and have the posts go up over the week).  But if it doesn’t happen, here is the excuse.  I’m time inconsistent and my best precommitment mechanism was to not buy the books – and it failed me.

Note:  One of the books appears to be premised on the idea that economics is returning to sociology, and that eventually they’ll combined into the same discipline (called sociology).  This isn’t the sociology book – this is one of the philosophy of economics books which I purchased under a bundle of “economic methodology books”.  I will report back once I’ve read it – there is a different one I want to read first, to see if it is a better introductory book than a few others I already own (specifically this fellow I learnt from – with a pdf version appearing here it seems).

I love introductory books, even in areas where I have read a bit of the literature, as the people who can communicate the ideas most clearly are often those that understand it most deeply.  Not always, but often.

Matt Nolan

Food: Getting lost in social constructivism

/3 Comments/in , /by

After reading both the Stuff article and the initial article on Gareth Morgan’s blog and the follow up, I am convinced both Gareth and Geoff Simmons (GG) have inadvertently become extreme social constructivists – but may not realise it yet.

Now I hate it when people just whip out rhetoric like “social constructivist” and don’t explain it – so what do I mean, how have they gone this way, and what do we know about this type of framework so we can analyse it?

Read more