Listen now | Noah Smith & Brad DeLong's 30:00 < [Length of Weekly Podcast] < 60:00: Key Insights: 1. Paul Feyerabend was right—science is whatever scientists do: anything goes. But what healthy sciences that survive and flourish and good scientists do is put first and foremost discovering what actually is and making theories to understand reality. So Kuhn and Popper are also right. 2. Economics has not been much of a science. But this Card, Angrist, Imbens—and Krueger—Nobel Prize marks a very big possible improvement in this respect.3. Keep at it! Keep doing your work no matter the brickbats, and you may, someday, look back and recognize that you have changed the world. 4Pets are good: they drive you to “become the person your dog thinks you already are”. 5.Hexapodia!
That 1992 speech by Bruce Sterling was incredibly prescient. I wonder what he might have said had he been given a glimpse of social media back then? 1992 was a time when few computers were networked, mostly within institutions. There was no world wide web. The world has thoroughly changed, attention has been commodified to the hilt, and spin doctors have been replaced by influencers and prolific misinformation and disinformation spreaders polluting the noosphere. AltaVista, and ultimately Google captured the space to direct attention via search. Facebook and Twitter just turned on the hose in "newsfeeds" to capture the attention more surely than 24/7 news tv. Neal Stephenson's "Anathem" had a parallel world where trust was embedded in the information space, like public-spirited librarians maintaining a quality collection in the stacks, and keeping the garbage out. We really need that today.
If teaching Econ 101 involves teaching easy falsehoods, isn't that getting dangerously close to religion? As long as the teaching later during the course then explains it is actually a falsehood and corrects it with reality, then it is OK. I trust that is what happens. STEM subjects don't teach known falsities which are later corrected, but rather a simplified version of the truth as it is currently understood, with detail in depth added in more advanced courses.
Can there really be "buyer side market power" without "oligopsony", a word which actually escaped Noah's lips? If so, please expand! And why no mention of "the theory of the 2nd best" in the review of econ 101?
Changing the subject, here is Gene Wolfe from Soldier of Arete:
"When the soul has been overwhelmed by grief ... a man does nothing that he is not compelled to do, for then he believes that nothing can help him. At such times he is no danger to himself or anyone else. But as the claws fall away, hope - the final horror, if I may say it, from that deadly box the gods packed for men - hope returns. It is then that his family and friends must watch a man, because he's apt to think that by putting an end to his life he'll put an end to his sorrows."
Observing natural experiments. That puts you in the good company of my first intellectual love, the science of astronomy. (Due to some character flaws that surfaced in my early twenties, I will forever be frustrated that I didn't get to become one.) But it is good company for your emerging science.
IIRC there wasn't a Nobel for Econ, that some other prize often referred to as such. Has it now been added as a true Nobel? Or do I recall incorrectly?
Re: Free as Air, Free As Water, Free As Knowledge
That 1992 speech by Bruce Sterling was incredibly prescient. I wonder what he might have said had he been given a glimpse of social media back then? 1992 was a time when few computers were networked, mostly within institutions. There was no world wide web. The world has thoroughly changed, attention has been commodified to the hilt, and spin doctors have been replaced by influencers and prolific misinformation and disinformation spreaders polluting the noosphere. AltaVista, and ultimately Google captured the space to direct attention via search. Facebook and Twitter just turned on the hose in "newsfeeds" to capture the attention more surely than 24/7 news tv. Neal Stephenson's "Anathem" had a parallel world where trust was embedded in the information space, like public-spirited librarians maintaining a quality collection in the stacks, and keeping the garbage out. We really need that today.
If teaching Econ 101 involves teaching easy falsehoods, isn't that getting dangerously close to religion? As long as the teaching later during the course then explains it is actually a falsehood and corrects it with reality, then it is OK. I trust that is what happens. STEM subjects don't teach known falsities which are later corrected, but rather a simplified version of the truth as it is currently understood, with detail in depth added in more advanced courses.
Can there really be "buyer side market power" without "oligopsony", a word which actually escaped Noah's lips? If so, please expand! And why no mention of "the theory of the 2nd best" in the review of econ 101?
Changing the subject, here is Gene Wolfe from Soldier of Arete:
"When the soul has been overwhelmed by grief ... a man does nothing that he is not compelled to do, for then he believes that nothing can help him. At such times he is no danger to himself or anyone else. But as the claws fall away, hope - the final horror, if I may say it, from that deadly box the gods packed for men - hope returns. It is then that his family and friends must watch a man, because he's apt to think that by putting an end to his life he'll put an end to his sorrows."
Observing natural experiments. That puts you in the good company of my first intellectual love, the science of astronomy. (Due to some character flaws that surfaced in my early twenties, I will forever be frustrated that I didn't get to become one.) But it is good company for your emerging science.
IIRC there wasn't a Nobel for Econ, that some other prize often referred to as such. Has it now been added as a true Nobel? Or do I recall incorrectly?
#4 Pets!!
Dogs maybe but not cats!!! Cats are god and you. are their servants!!!!