Comments on: Richard Bookstaber on Economic Methods

By: Roger Sweeny

Roger Sweeny — Fri, 07 Jul 2017 11:39:32 +0000

Of course there is a market for economists–several in fact. But you have to ask “who is buying?” and “why?”

Too often people don’t do that and fall into silliness, like thinking that the consumers of K-12 are students.

By: Epiphyte

Epiphyte — Thu, 06 Jul 2017 20:51:57 +0000

The quote that you shared by Daniel Nevins is pretty wonderful…. “Economists are free from the market forces they study.” So just how beneficial are market forces anyways? If they aren’t at all beneficial, and perhaps even detrimental, then it’s great that economists are free from them. But if they are beneficial, then the more beneficial they are, the more problematic it is that economists are free from them.

Actually, economists who write books aren’t entirely free from market forces. Liberals are the first to love the fact that Piketty’s book was a bestseller. Then again, it’s not like the Wealth of Nations will make the bestseller list anytime soon. Why buy the cow when you can get the milk for free?

Ideally there would be something like Netflix for academic papers. Subscribers would pay $5/month and be able to read all the papers. However, subscribers would also have the option to divide their limited subscription dollars among the unlimited papers. So market forces would determine the relative importance of the papers. The demand for topics would determine the supply of topics.

My guess is that we don’t already have this type of market for academic papers because there isn’t a market for academic papers. In the absence of a market, it’s logical that the papers supplied will be largely irrelevant. Otherwise, markets themselves would be largely irrelevant. So I’m not quite sure how to escape this catch 22, other than write comments like this one.

By: Dave

Dave — Thu, 06 Jul 2017 17:27:38 +0000

I’ve been asking Russ Roberts to interview agent based modelers in Economics since 2008. I just looked up my original email on the subject, and I suggested Richard Bookstaber in it for his other book, A Demon of Our Own Design… (although that was separate from my ABM suggestion at the time, which was Eric Beinhocker, who is mentioned frequently in Bookstaber’s new book).

ABM has its own share of challenges, but it seems like anyone who emphasizes emergent order in economics should be interested in this subject.

By: Handle

Handle — Thu, 06 Jul 2017 15:33:33 +0000

Your summary of Bookstaber’s views reminds me of Cowen’s discussion of the Big Data analysis of web companies in Chapter 11 of Average Is Over. He said that the companies rely on a similar “state at the world” view, enabled by their world-bestriding perspective sitting on their monumental proprietary peaks of data, and that they proceed in a very atheoretical manner, with supicion and even disdain for mainstream economy theory and hyper-simplified modeling.

By: Matthew Young

Matthew Young — Thu, 06 Jul 2017 13:23:59 +0000

Someone has to blindside us, so there are two camps. One camp has the inside information about the blindside, the other is looking around. The goal is to incentivize the blindsiders to bet their inside information early. Thus we are merely nearsided.