Economists, I think, often tend to have a different way of looking at things. They ask particular sorts of questions and often arrive at different kinds of answers than us non-economists. For us, economic work often can seem to take place in a world unto itself. Sometimes, though, what economists argue and and call out…
Tag: economics
Explaining Economics
Academic disciplines are more than collections of scholars, faculty, classes and majors and graduate students. They are people bound together by like-minded questions and processes, pursuing shared ways of asking and answering difficult questions that can inform who we are and what we do as educated human beings. Sometimes, amid all the bashing of higher…
Humans and Imaginary Vulcans
Daniel Kahneman’s Thinking, Fast and Slow is an important book, well deserving of its Wikipedia page. Kahneman, along with his late partner Amos Tversky, won the Nobel Prize in Economic Sciences even though the pair are psychologists. They have a genius for creative experimentation. The book is a high-level summation of their research, along with…
Place Really Matter$
We are in the midst of a massive economic, political, and cultural transformation in the United States. Some analysts see the difference as the growing split between red states and blue states. Others identify “haves” and “have-nots” and think that rising income inequality is the cause. Berkeley economist Enrico Moretti makes a compelling argument, grounded…
Rendering The Abstract Accessible – Economic Theories Made Clear
Appearing informed about contemporary affairs requires familiarity with economics. Being informed, especially understanding current political debates, demands real grounding in macroeconomic policy. Economics today is more than an influential discipline. Leading economists – Paul Krugman, Jeffrey Sachs, Amartya Sen, Joseph Stiglizt and Larry Summers – are public intellectuals and thought leaders. Many of the big political…
Decline in the 1970s – A Pivotal Decade
Judith Stein’s Pivotal Decade: How the United States Traded Factories for Finance in the Seventies makes for depressing reading. Her narrative counters Whiggish histories of continuous progress with a sobering account of economic decline. It is a chronicle of poor decisions, written from the vantage point of a post-industrial United States with fractious politics and a…