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 the detractors of neuroeconomics have to say about its techniques.

Here’s a two paragraph summary of [...]

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 Chinese proverbs.

Tim Harford on why some people cheat, and others don’t.

Stuart Jeffries on why happiness is overrated.

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 “sociophysics” which seems, to me, to be mostly simulations in which independent entities (particles, [...]

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 understand how the bureaucracy responds to individual and social needs, participants were randomly assigned [...]

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 Stone of the State University of New York-Stony Brook) are reporting something quite interesting:

While most [...]

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, etc) during this period as a key development.

The natives of the other disciplines, of course, [...]

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 — in fact, anything. This question was triggered recently by the NYTimes obiturary ofJohn Kenneth [...]

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.

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Here is the link to the NYTimes obituary. I have collected a few quotes here.