The Wisdom of the Crowds in Your Head: The Case of Behavioral Finance

A common idea in the social sciences is that two wrongs can make a right, when errors cancel each other out.  So we have the Median Voter theorem, the Efficient Market Hypothesis, the Wisdom of Crowds.
Some aspiring rationalists have worried that the same process takes place not only in large groups of people, but within [...]

Macro Flame War

There are lots of Great Internet Debates- over operating systems, video game consoles, or politics.  This last week, a similar sort of name-calling verbal brawl broke out among prominent macro-economists.  But that exchange featured long posts and highly technical arguments.  To simplify it for you, I will summarize the debate as the flame war it [...]

Health Care Solutions: The Free Lunch is over here, what are you eating?

After a few months of reading about this bizarre health care debate, I think I finally understand things well enough to put my thoughts on record.  (Was the wait against the spirit of blogging? I probably should have written a ill-informed post to respond to each twist, turn and dumb remark)
First, I should say that [...]

Has the Fed bought the Economics profession?

There’s an intriguing and well written, though overly long, article over at HuffPo called “How the Federal Reserve Bought the Economics Profession“.
The basic idea is that so many economists work for the Fed, have worked for the Fed, or want to work for the Fed that their desire to please their employer has stifled debate [...]

I time-traveled here from 1987 to say: You future people like weird things

(Continuing from my previous post, Does the  idea of sustainability survive sustained inquiry?)
Sustainability means preserving good things for future generations.  But as Bob Solow notes, we have no idea what the preferences of future generations are; we are likely to think they are weird.  After all, if someone in 1800 were trying to make people [...]

Does the idea of sustainability survive sustained inquiry?

In Bob Solow’s 1993 “Economist’s Perspective on Sustainability“, it survives as a “necessarily vague, but useful” idea.  He notes that sustainability has been conflated with other moral ideas about environmental protection, but that sustainability itself does not necessarily mean preserving species or wilderness.  Instead it is about “distributional equity” between the present and the future.  [...]