Category: Economic theory
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Mark D. White In today's installment of The Stone in The New York Times, Gary Gutting interviewed philosopher of economics Daniel Hausman about the role of economics in public policy and the media. Hausman usefully points out the limitations of economics in predicting the outcome of real-life crises (such as the current Greek crisis): Speaking…
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Mark D. White I was very sad to hear of Professor Gary Becker's passing. Although I never met him, and heard him speak only once, he had a tremendous impact on my life and career. As an undergraduate economics major in college, I was focusing on monetary economics and anticipating a career with the Federal…
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Mark D. White Recently, at The Weekly Standard, David M. Smick opined in a piece titled "The Death of Economics" on the decline of the field over the last 50 years, focusing on the last decade in particular and the increasing hubris among policy-oriented economists: For decades, hubris has been the common currency of the…
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Mark D. White The worst thing to do when I'm trying to write is have Twitter open. Not only is it distracting (obviously), but it can be positively engrossing. So why do I do it? Because it helps me keep me up-to-date on the state of the world and what smart people are saying about…
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Mark D. White Kevin Drum at Mother Jones recently highlighted a new paper by Kimmo Eriksson (Mälardalen University and Stockholm University) published in Judgment and Decision Making titled "The Nonsense Math Effect" (7/6, November 2012). Here's the abstract: Mathematics is a fundamental tool of research. Although potentially applicable in every discipline, the amount of training…
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Mark D. White A recent issue of Science (October 5, 2012) is a special issue on depression, and senior editor Peter Stern's introduction lays out the reason for it (emphasis mine): Depression is a devastating disease. It affects not only the directly afflicted but also the people around them, their families, and their closest relations.…
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Mark D. White Yesterday, Kevin Drum at Mother Jones spoke up for social science following an editorial in Nature arguing against the NSF's proposed defunding of research in political science. Here's a bit of the op-ed: Part of the blame must lie with the practice of labelling the social sciences as soft, which too readily translates as…
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Mark D. White Last month, The Economist published an article (based on research published in Journal of Marketing) on consumers' irrationality when compared discounts and added content: Consumers often struggle to realise, for example, that a 50% increase in quantity is the same as a 33% discount in price. They overwhelmingly assume the former is better value.…
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Mark D. White In the New York Times, psychologist Barry Schwartz (author of The Paradox of Choice: Why More Is Less) warns us of "The Danger of Too Much Efficiency," in which he argues that, while efficiency is generally a good thing and enables increases in standards of living, more efficiency is not necessarily better.…
Mark D. White 