Categories:
Economic Methods
Oct 11 2011
When people eat and drink too much, most of us blame the consumer. Businesses don't force anyone to become obese alcoholics; they're just responding to consumer demand. If people started spending their money more wisely, business would uncomplainingly cater to their new choices.Of course, you could blame bo...
Oct 10 2011
That would be my position. A government-run system of teacher compensation, based on test scores, would in some ways be the worst of all worlds. It would create incentives for teachers to "game" the system. It would give too much weight to a noisy indicator of performance. As a result, it would do little or nothing to...
Oct 10 2011
Tyler Cowen tells you about Sargent and Sims. My reaction is, "eh." Sort of like Bert Blyleven. Star players, but not historically important, unless you're from Minnesota.
READER COMMENTS
Vinnie
Oct 10 2011 at 10:10am
I know almost nothing about economics–much less the Nobel Prize–other than what I read on this blog, but I do enjoy the Hall of Fame humor.
Jack
Oct 10 2011 at 10:46am
Dr. Kling, I understand that you are unimpressed with a Nobel for DSGE, rational expectations, and Vector autoregressions, all tools that have led to huge scholarly output but little practical relevance. In a sense, their work did not help us learn more about the macroeconomy. But wouldn’t you agree that at least their work showed us that what we thought we knew (old Keynesian macro) clearly was wrong? So we replaced a faulty theory with a void of applicable theory.
FiftySeven
Oct 10 2011 at 11:22am
I’m not sure if Blyleven is the best comparison here. The man is 5th all time in career strikeouts and 9th in career shutouts. I’d call that historically important.
Mike
Oct 10 2011 at 11:34am
Having grown up in Minnesota, then moved away, real far away, I believe FiftySeven to be a Minnesotan. They have a peculiar way about them, they find it really hard to take a joke. Especially about their sports heroes. Maybe I’m wrong. If so, FiftySeven, I apologize.
But if you go on about how Fran Tarkenton was a better quarterback than Roger Staubach, I’ll know for certain you’re from Minnesota.
Back in the day, us econ students up there (I went to school near the UofM) heard Sargent this and Sargent that all the time.
Congrats to Sargent and Simms!
FiftySeven
Oct 10 2011 at 2:37pm
Mike — No offense taken, though I am not from Minnesota. I’ve just followed the debate over Blyleven’s Hall of Fame merits pretty closely, and always felt he was more than worthy of induction (especially compared to Rice, Dawson, etc.), and never understood why there was any doubt.
If I had known more about Sargent & Simms when I first read the post, I would have realized the joke was more about Minnesotans than Blyleven’s credentials; my mistake.
GlibFighter
Oct 11 2011 at 1:24am
‘… not historically important.’ Really? You have a telling sense of history.
ajb
Oct 11 2011 at 7:54am
This is Arnold’s blind spot. It is pure MIT snobbery. Even if they’re totally wrong, they are most certainly “historically important” by any reasonable metric. It is precisely this attitude which sank Cambridge, MA’s influence on macro. Rather than engaging they withdrew and lost the war.
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