Category Archives: Economics
Golden Trivia
From Who’s Got All The Gold, And Who’s Mining It: All Gold Ever Mined – The total amount of gold ever mined is estimated to be worth around US$5 trillion. How Gold is Used – You might have though (like … Continue reading
Neuroeconomics
John Cassidy has a wonderful New Yorker essay on what neuroeconomists do, new insights the subject might offer us about our economic behaviour and decisions, how it might make mainstream economics revisit some of its rather restrictive assumptions, and what … Continue reading
Time is too short …
… to post excerpts. Here are the links anyway: FT‘s review of Yochai Benkler’s Wealth of Networks: How Social Production Transforms Markets and Freedom” Tyler Cowen’s latest NYTimes column on gastronomical economics. Daniel Gross on why businesspeople love to quote … Continue reading
Sociophysics
After writing this post about economics, physics and econophysics, I was poking around the web, looking for Philip Ball’s articles. Ball is the author of the piece that I linked to in my post, and has written quite enthusiastically about … Continue reading
Corruption and New Delhi’s dangerous drivers
An academic paper by Marianne Bertrand, Simeon Djankov, Rema Hanna, Sendhil Mullainathan examines this issue with drivers in New Delhi. Here’s the abstract: We follow 822 applicants through the process of obtaining a driver’s license in New Delhi, India. To … Continue reading
Illusory link between income and happiness
Ttwo Princeton professors, economist Alan B. Krueger and psychologist and Nobel laureate Daniel Kahneman, in collaboration with three others from other universities (psychologists David Schkade of the University of California-San Diego, Norbert Schwarz of the University of Michigan and Arthur … Continue reading
Is Economics the ‘New’ Physics?
For a long time, physicists have had a reputation for boldly venturing into other disciplines. Indeed, in a recent Physics Today article recounting the history of physics since 1931, Spencer Weart specifically mentions the rise of ‘hyphenated physics’ (bio-physics, geo-physics, … Continue reading
Can economic models ‘prove’ anything?
This has something to do with the little ‘just-so’ theory I indulged myself in yesterday. Though my intention was totally non-serious (but not frivolous!), one still has to wonder if serious economic models can ever be said to ‘prove’ something … Continue reading
John Kenneth Galbraith
Two links: The first, to a profile in Guardian, is from several years ago. The second, to a NYTimes op-ed by Robert H. Frank, goes into some of the possible reasons for why he didn’t get the Nobel. * * … Continue reading
