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Who's Hot and Who's Not
David Leonardt polls the AEA meetings and reports. Of course all but one or two of these names already have been covered on MR...
Posted by Tyler Cowen on January 10, 2007 at 08:36 AM in Economics | Permalink
Comments
When does a "young" economist become an "old" economist? The article lists ages of 2 of the 13, 26 and 41.
Posted by: Bill at Jan 10, 2007 12:55:12 PM
You've got to love it.
Economics is a crashing failure when it comes to providing a coherent explanatory strategy for explaining economic order in the overall economy -- or a similiar strategy for explaining "macro" disorder. So what are all of the young "researchers" doing -- they are off doing any and every tiny thing else besides putting the house of economics as a science back in order.
What was once a game of making nearly useless "tools" and mathematical constructs has now became a game of applying those formal toys to smaller and smaller matters. But at least some use has been found for all of the "research" bought and paid for by the U.S. military and the National Science Foundation.
Posted by: PrestoPundit at Jan 10, 2007 12:57:03 PM
I counted seven names: Oster, Shapiro, Chetty, Gruber, Leavitt,
Murphy, and somebody else (forget). Murphy is getting a bit
long in the tooth to be labeled "young" anymore. He got his
J.B. Clark award quite some time ago.
Want to enlighten us by link or list on the rest of them, please?
Posted by: Barkley Rosser at Jan 10, 2007 1:57:59 PM
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/01/09/business/10leonhardt-sites.html
Prestopundit: If you think that understanding human behavior and interactions is a small matter then you are bound to dislike microeconomics. By the way, economics is a *social* science, not a science.
Posted by: Commenterlein at Jan 10, 2007 2:28:43 PM
In many ways "economics" over the last 60 years has contributed more to the _misunderstanding_ of human behavior and human interaction than it has toward the understanding of these. More fundamentally, "economics" has misconstrued the overall problem of economics order to be explained, and it has utterly failed to make sense of it's "tools" in providing a sound causal explanation for that order. There is a huge literature on this.
Posted by: PrestoPundit at Jan 10, 2007 3:00:30 PM
PrestoPundit: No doubt many respectable researchers echo your position, but your statement as it stands is not enlightening. You seem to believe that economics should strictly adhere to studying macroeconomic questions, that is, pertaining to the economy. Many non-economist social scientists maintain that position. It is a good debate, but you should explain what you mean. As for causality, well, isn't that what social scientists must struggle with day in and day out?
Posted by: Jack at Jan 10, 2007 3:22:12 PM
Mr. Leonhardt says "But economists have been acting a lot like intellectual imperialists in the last decade or so." He must be very young: economists were accused of being imperialists in the 1970s. Actually, they were very successful imperialists. In the 1990s, the imperialists started to pay attention to the new territories they had conquered and to take advantage of natives' theoretical and empirical research. Today most economists do no longer care about discipline lines.
He also claims that "... esoteric fiscal and monetary models that once dominated economics." Before 1990, there were many fiscal and monetary models but, thanks God, they never dominated economics. Mr. Leonhardt seems to think that before 2000, economics used to be only macroeconomics.
Finally, in the last paragraph of his articule, Mr. Leonhard says "But think about what scientists do when they uncover a problem: they try to solve it." He seems to think scientists are like engineers. He's wrong about scientists (they try to understand and explain "problems", not to solve them), although many have argued that economists should be like engineers rather than scientists (an idea criticized by J. Buchanan in the early 1960's).
Posted by: Edgardo at Jan 10, 2007 4:56:29 PM
The best part of the NYT article is the quote that nowadays in economics there is "too much cleverness for cleverness's sake"! For those of us working in applied micro, that seems to ring true. The more "clever" the IV used, the better...
Posted by: Rob at Jan 10, 2007 6:29:50 PM
Leonhardt really does seem pretty clueless about what has gone on in the field. And his idea of the economist as social worker is a pretty narrow one. It is true, though, that economists have historically been reformers of various sorts.
Posted by: srp at Jan 10, 2007 8:37:27 PM
Prestopundit,
Why waste your time bashing Econ on an Econ blog? To get readers for your blog? Lame.
More generally,
Having been schooled in the Economic way of thinking on social science issues, I find that when I encounter them in other fields such as political science that they have not absorbed fully the Economics ideas. In the end it leaves a bad taste in my mouth with regard to other social science fields.
Posted by: RWP at Jan 10, 2007 11:59:18 PM
RWP, it would be great if there existed a single coherent explanatory strategy called "the economic way of thinking", but facts betray the the official ideology of the profession. Any good book in the history of economic thought over the last 75 years would disabuse you of this illusion.
Posted by: PrestoPundit at Jan 11, 2007 12:19:56 AM
This article is yet one more example of why I am always surprised that anyone reads the NYT on a regular basis, yet alone treats it as a sort of quasi-religious experience as many people seem to do. Whenever they write about something where I actually know the details, they are consistently wrong.
There are some smart folks on this list, but these eight are not doing anything all that very different than what went before, nor are these eight appreciably more clever or bright than many other young economists not on the list, including some of my fine junior colleagues.
As to "presto", whenever I read various critiques of neoclassical economics, and I have read many, it always seems to turn out that the writer does not actually understand neo-classical economics or holds up one tiny part of it as the whole profession. But then I went to Chicago, which stumped poor old Colander by being the one graduate school with happy students (as you can read for yourself in the book "The Making of an Economist" - bonus points if you can find me in there despite the name change.
Sigh.
Jeff
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