Economics

Archive for Economics

Show Me the Empirical Success of the Empirical Method in Economics

In the comments of my latest post, as well as the second front of this war going on here, we’ve been raising the usual issues that come up in this debate on the empirical method in economic science. I have to be brief, but let me summarize my perspective: (1) Many people simply assume that […]

The Intellectual Bankruptcy of (Mainstream) Macroeconomics

I borrowed that title from Russ Roberts (but inserted the qualifier “mainstream” since, of coure, I love how the Austrians do “macro” topics like business cycle theory). You may recall that Russ was the inspiration for my recent post where I chortled over (what Russ and I thought was) a clearly botched prediction from Krugman […]

Australia’s Carbon Tax: Lessons for the United States

That’s the title of my blog post summarizing the key points from Dr. Alex Robson’s new study (commissioned by IER) on Australia’s experience with a carbon tax. I don’t want to reduce your incentive to follow the link, so I won’t give any quotes here. There are some purdy graphs and everything, so it’s easy […]

Another Bang-Up Prediction From Krugman, On Employment and the Sequester

UPDATE below. Russ Roberts reminded me of Krugman’s discussion of the sequester back in February: But the legacy of [the Bowles/Simpson deficit commission] lives on, in the form of the “sequester,” one of the worst policy ideas in our nation’s history. Here’s how it happened: Republicans engaged in unprecedented hostage-taking, threatening to push America into […]

More Reflections on Ronald Coase

Since the transaction costs are so low, why not send you to everything I’ve seen so far: ==> David Gordon talks about Rothbard’s relation to Coase. ==> Robert Higgs gives his recollections. ==> Here’s David R. Henderson. ==> And finally, here’s Steve Landsburg. For my own thoughts, I think Coase’s famous article “On Social Cost” […]

Potpourri

==> Pete Boettke has a nice post on Ronald Coase. BTW, Pete alludes to an episode where William Baumol “got confused” on a basic economic principle. Does anyone have the details? ==> Jonathan Catalan digs up an interesting quotation from Keynes about mathematical economics. ==> This investment firm (I have no relationship with them, at […]

More on Mathematical Economic Modeling

Alex Tabarrok heaps praise upon “Quantitative Economics,” a new online text. Here is part of its description: This website contains a sequence of lectures on economic modeling, focusing on the use of programming and computers for both problem solving and building intuition. The primary programming language used in the lecture series is Python, a general […]

My Thoughts on Formalism in Economics

Recently many econobloggers have offered their thoughts on what is often called “mathematics in economics,” but I think is really more about formalistic model building in economics. Here’s a very interesting post that has links to some of the other people in this dispute. For my part, just some scattered observations with no necessarily overarching […]