huitzitziltzin

Newspapers have an extremely expensive product. They have to pay for it somehow! You can’t give away an expensive product for free forever!

No one on the internet likes paying for access to content. After 35 years we have not found a way to monetize except ad tech.

Is that so hard to understand?

Every time someone links an article on this website from an expensive print publication, there is immediately a link in the comments to a paywall-evading site!

The dialog around ads on HN is extremely low quality, highly focused on costs and with no attention at all paid to benefits.

I stand by my statement.

I’d love an estimate from you (or anyone) about the marginal effect on the profession’s “legitimacy” (which is what? and how’s it measured?) from having the prize include Nobel’s name vs. not including it.

Really we don’t care.

Sure…

Mokyr’s northwestern website has links to a lot of his papers.

An extremely crude selection rule:

Anything published in the American economic review, quarterly journal of economics, journal of political economy has the profession’s “highest stamp of approval”. It’s really hard to publish anything there. (There are two journals im not listing in that “top” category but he has no papers there on his website.). On aghion or howitts websites, look for the above journals but also econometrica and the review of economic studies. Those are the “top five” in the field.

There are surely papers in good history and Econ history journals on mokyr’s website but I don’t know the journals!

Standards for any chapter in a “handbook of X economics” or “handbook of the economics of X” are high - those should be good surveys.

Similarly a paper in the “annual review of economics”

Also mokyr has a bunch of work on Amazon. “The lever of riches” is a classic. “A culture of growth” is well regarded.

Finally he has a forthcoming book called “two paths to prosperity” with two other distinguished guys - one Econ historian (greif) and one political economy guy (tabellini). It’s coming out in about three weeks. Good timing, Princeton U Press!

Aghion and howitt have a growth textbook at the advanced undergrad level called “the economics of growth.”

They have a much more advanced work called “endogenous growth theory” which is for specialists (or at least anyone with first year PhD macro)

Aghion has a book called “the power of creative destruction.”

You can start with a used copy of an older edition of mankiw’s text which is a standard undergrad reference.

Barro also has an old undergrad macro text which is good

The gap between undergrad macro and professional macro is extremely large. That shouldn’t dissuade you it’s just a note.

Economist here…

An unexpected (to me!) prize but definitely a good one.

What’s notable is that mokyr’s research is very, very accessible to a layman. You can read his books and understand them nearly perfectly without needing substantial technical background. (Of course there’s a huge existing literature in economics and history he’s engaging with which you won’t know, but I’m not an economic historian either so a lot of it is unfamiliar to me too.). Try it! Hopefully you learn something.

Also the committee always releases a good non-technical summary of the laureates work and an even better “more technical” summary. You can start there for an overview.

As for the point which will be raised endlessly here that this is “not a real Nobel” - whatever. No one in the economics profession cares. Alfred Nobel doesn’t have a monopoly on prizes or priority to decide which fields are worth recognizing. It’s our highest prestige prize. Call it what you want.

If you read the review, you will see the author notes that issue pretty often and specifically discusses ways in which the oldest book he reviews (from 2014) both is and isn’t useful.

It’s worth reading

Why stand up and not use your legs at all?? People have rowed it.

This is a weird stunt that won’t prove anything. If he (magically) made it in a week people would still fly.

What’s the point? Don’t say “raising awareness”. Whose mind does the exercise have a chance of changing about what question? What behavioral change will that changed mind cause?

Agree that these are very very hard industries in which to secure employment.

At the least the anecdote is not that informative about the effects of AI, given the details.

(2021)

The funniest thing about the reaction from all of his neighbors is that none of them are willing to do the one thing that really would annoy Zuckerberg and probably make him move: build multi story, multi tenant housing (i.e., small apartment buildings!) on plots he doesn’t already own.

Go to the city and ask for permission to replace two lots with five story apartment buildings with a view into his backyard. He’ll sue immediately and if he can’t stop it he’ll move.

No doubt it’s impossible to even get permission to do so (which is a separate problem!), but if those whiners really want revenge on the guy who they think “ruined their neighborhood” there’s one option they aren’t pursuing.

Entirely useless recommendations and very dubious empirical claims here. Let’s take them one at a time….

- “The climate crisis and socio-ecological issues are broadly absent from economic curricula.”

-> I don’t believe that for a second. Externalities are taught in every Econ 101 class I’ve ever heard of.

“75% of universities do not teach any ecological economics”

-> as a whole class maybe not but that doesn’t mean the material doesn’t get covered.

“ instead, when issues of ecological sustainability are taught, environmental damage is considered as something that needs to be priced into market mechanisms.”

-> which is a completely normal, standard idea among economists for good reason!

“Economics education does not address historical and contemporary power imbalances”

-> that’s not our job? Wtf - that’s not part of economics at all. Does it get covered in statistics? In history? I don’t know who’s responsible but it’s not us.

“55% of universities do not provide meaningful teaching on questions of historical slavery, colonialism, or neocolonialism at all. History and ethics are absent from these discussions.”

-> economics departments are not being held responsible for this supposed omissions but I really doubt this supposed fact is true. Does an American history class count or not ? It’s just not possible that slavery is not taught.

“Mainstream neoclassical economics dominates the economic theories taught.”

-> also a good sign as that’s the standard. We don’t teach Marxist thought anymore. That’s progress.

“Of the 480 theory modules we graded, 88.3% of them included mainstream neoclassical economic thinking focusing on rational, self-interested individuals.”

-> Show me any alternative that’s credible. Also: behavioral methods are widely taught. We are plenty criticism of our own models. That’s also Econ 101 material.

“They are almost entirely taught through quantitative technical skills.”

->. Good. Also: as opposed to…? What exactly?

“Economics is taught in isolation from other social sciences. The discipline of economics should be embedded within the social sciences, and students should be encouraged to learn across other disciplines such as politics, sociology, geography, and history, but for the most part, it remains siloed”

-> that’s true of what happens in every other department too. Leave it up to universities to set distribution requirements.

“There are two programmes that are critical, climate-conscious, and provide an economics education fit for the 21st century. SOAS and the University of Greenwich introduce students to a range of intellectual and methodological perspectives within the economics discipline. They put a learning focus on climate, power, and inequality throughout the course.”

-> eye roll.

I have a PhD in economics with a specialization in antitrust policy.

Fact:

“Matt stoller gets big, important issues wrong in antitrust all the time and his analysis shouldn’t be taken seriously.”

Source: me

You are welcome to cite that.

Not surprising at all to hear that Matt Stoller got the economics of an antitrust issue wrong. I appreciate the attention he brings to the topic and his diligence in digging up stories but his own analysis is often just totally wrong. I don’t think he’s worth taking seriously as an analyst. Maybe as a reporter at best.

I would love to see more of their game theory example.

Having experience teaching the subject myself, what I saw on that page is about the first five minutes of the first class of the semester at best. The devil will very much be in the other 99% of what you do.

Great question! And a great example of why the central question in any antitrust issue is defining the market.

Define it narrowly enough, and Firm A buying Firm B might create a monopoly - the regulator cannot approve that.

Define it broadly, and Firm A buying Firm B takes the market from 21 firms to 20 - the regulator is unlikely to stand in the way.

(In practice the market definition question in the US will often happen in front of a judge and the two sides are the merging parties vs. the regulator (FTC or DOJ).)

In this case, is the relevant market “restaurant delivery service via an app” ?

In that case five firms is (likely) moderately concentrated at last. (If you have the market shares of the five firms, you can compute an index called the HHI to get a rough sense of how much more concentrated the market will be before and after a merger.)

However… “app based food delivery” doesn’t seem like a credible market to me. The firms are unlikely to have pricing power either over restaurants or customers.

Candidate competing markets:

- going to the restaurant directly

- making food at home

- delivery provided by the restaurant

Any one of the five firms currently in the market who wanted to buy another would argue to include all three as the “relevant market” in which case their share (both before and after) is tiny.

The regulator will argue for a narrower definition.

When you see commentary on this website about “X is a monopolist” or strong claims like that (which are made frequently!), almost never is there any appeal to a market definition!

Fortunately judges get better input than HN commentators.

(2018)

And the title should be “…who speak many languages.”

Speaking one language may be something of a mystery but to most of us it’s at least a familiar state.

How do you handle the very well known limits of LLMs in your especially-sensitive use case? Hallucinations are the leading example. Health queries are a really bad place to do even mild “imagining” of responses.

This feels like a “break glass in case of emergency” kind of moment. Sure there are no details yet, but I’m trying to imagine details which would make me think “that arrest makes sense.” If I were in Milwaukee I’d be in the streets.

Great piece and deserves to be complemented by the time series of daily outlays from the US treasury starting Jan 20 compared to the last two years.

Elon Musk is failing to cut American spending https://economist.com/finance-and-economics/2025/02/12/elon-... from The Economist

tl;dr: DOGE is having zero impact on federal spending.

The large tech firms get a surprisingly large amount of hate on antitrust issues on this website for startups so I appreciate your point bc I think it’s often missed.

The oil dividend (likely what they are talking about though I didn’t look) is something like $1,300/year. That’s not universal basic income in the pie-in-the-sky way the phrase is usually used. No one is interested in whether the Alaska dividend makes people not work.

If UBI is limited to a low amount that you couldn’t possibly live on then sure, it’s perfectly possible.

Of all the things which are never going to happen, I put universal basic income at the top of the list. Faster than light travel seems vastly more likely than universal basic income.

I don’t believe we can pay for it, nor do I believe that it’s remotely politically feasible.

Studies like this are perfectly nice but I can’t imagine they are actually designed to confidently predict the general equilibrium effects of rolling out UBI on an entire society. (The studies may not be designed with that in mind but it’s crucial.)

There are plenty of people working on the application of ML in economics, including NN methods, and including in macro.

That’s a totally different class of model to this agent based approach. People in the (small) agent based modeling community have been pushing their stuff for decades to no effect.

Sure it’s possible that there’s some amazing advance I can’t see coming in the future but as of now I would not recommend anyone pursue ABM.

I don’t agree that it doesn’t make sense. It’s a good approximation a lot of the time.

Also: from your comment I’m pretty sure you don’t have the background (correct me if that’s wrong) and so don’t know what it really means in practice to make an equilibrium assumption in a macro model: Markets clear, on average people have reasonable beliefs about the evolution of aggregate variables, firms maximize expected profits. That’s all pretty harmless.

I definitely don’t agree that we are “using mathematical tools which aren’t suited for that.” We aren’t treating the economy “like a steam engine.” The entire revolution in macro from the 1970’s on involves optimizing agents. There is no useful analogy to a steam engine.

I suspect you have been reading criticism by people who are misinformed about what macro actually is and how it is practiced.

Sure it’s just macro.

Ljungqvist and Sargent is a standard grad level text.

Acemoglu has one with a growth focus.

Miao is another one.

Stachurski and Sargent is one focused on computational issues.

Stokey Lucas and Prescott is the math but I would skip that.

Dejong and Dave covers macroeconometrics.

There’s a whole discipline which does nearly that, though they do not use this style of agent based model.

Generally agent based models have numerous parameters which can take many values (endowments, preferences) and the models don’t themselves give any guidance about how to set the parameters. Theory can give limited guidance (eg., that function is concave, this parameter is negative). Sometimes we have experimental data though its generalizability beyond the lab is uncertain.

What you want to do to create a scientific macroeconomics is to work backwards from the data you see in the economy (aggregate consumption, investment, etc.) and how you know the aggregates were generated (via the behavior of a lot of individual agents), and an equilibrium assumption to recover the parameters.

If you know the parameters of the model you assume, you can then simulate interesting counterfactuals. (And yes you assume the model - a “full” model including “all” of the individual endowments and parameters you can think of is completely intractable. You have to simplify.)

You’ll never get that out of the author’s computer game.

If you want references to the macro literature it’s enormous and I can provide them.

No. There is no macroeconomist who wouldn’t adopt these approaches if they were “better”.

Agent based models have been around since the 1980’s at least. No one uses them in central banks, no one uses them in industry, and you can be very confident that they’ve tried.

What individuals may or may not understand is irrelevant. The professional staff at Treasury or Commerce will include a variety of people with a lot of relevant knowledge and experience.

Then there are people who clearly don’t understand (but should know better) like Navarro.

The beliefs of the man at the top, which are not particularly fixed and vary from hour to hour according to what has most recently been tweeted at him, are the only beliefs that matter.

He is not known to be a deep thinker about matters of international economics so I wouldn’t expect much!

Though I deplore detention and deportation for immigration violations, it’s worth mentioning in this case that this poor woman was asked to bring some biological samples back from France by her adviser and didn’t declare them. That’s not in the headline.

There is no suggestion in the article that she is being detained for her opposition to the Ukraine war.

She probably doesn’t have a great case. The culpable party here is 1000% her adviser who asked her to bring the samples back given “the complications [her adviser] Peshkin has experienced when French colleagues try to mail him research samples.” (Ok so you aren’t supposed to bring such material here…)

It’s unconscionable and incredibly stupid to put a foreign student at risk by asking for such a “favor”, which she surely didn’t feel in a position to refuse. He shouldn’t even have asked an American (who can’t be deported) to do such a thing!

Can you finish 2000 pages of math textbooks in a four year math degree???

Also you seem to arrive at your first ML application after 1500 pages or so.

I’m reminded of a class at my university on “early Christian literature” where the professor announced on the first day that despite the title they would actually start in 3,000 BC.