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huitzitziltzin commented on The Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel 2025   nobelprize.org/prizes/eco... · Posted by u/k2enemy
nibles_and_bits · 2 months ago
No one in the economics profession cares.

Another contradiction by a member of the economics profession. It seems to me they care very much. By linking the prize to Alfred Nobel’s name (and to the Nobel institutions), the Riksbank ensured the prize would immediately carry great symbolic prestige. The Nobel brand was already well established internationally, so adopting the name helped the economics prize gain recognition, gravitas, and legitimacy.

huitzitziltzin · 2 months ago
I stand by my statement.

I’d love an estimate from you (or anyone) about the marginal effect on the profession’s “legitimacy” (which is what? and how’s it measured?) from having the prize include Nobel’s name vs. not including it.

Really we don’t care.

huitzitziltzin commented on The Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel 2025   nobelprize.org/prizes/eco... · Posted by u/k2enemy
laborcontract · 2 months ago
Are there any good papers floating out there?
huitzitziltzin · 2 months ago
Sure…

Mokyr’s northwestern website has links to a lot of his papers.

An extremely crude selection rule:

Anything published in the American economic review, quarterly journal of economics, journal of political economy has the profession’s “highest stamp of approval”. It’s really hard to publish anything there. (There are two journals im not listing in that “top” category but he has no papers there on his website.). On aghion or howitts websites, look for the above journals but also econometrica and the review of economic studies. Those are the “top five” in the field.

There are surely papers in good history and Econ history journals on mokyr’s website but I don’t know the journals!

Standards for any chapter in a “handbook of X economics” or “handbook of the economics of X” are high - those should be good surveys.

Similarly a paper in the “annual review of economics”

Also mokyr has a bunch of work on Amazon. “The lever of riches” is a classic. “A culture of growth” is well regarded.

Finally he has a forthcoming book called “two paths to prosperity” with two other distinguished guys - one Econ historian (greif) and one political economy guy (tabellini). It’s coming out in about three weeks. Good timing, Princeton U Press!

Aghion and howitt have a growth textbook at the advanced undergrad level called “the economics of growth.”

They have a much more advanced work called “endogenous growth theory” which is for specialists (or at least anyone with first year PhD macro)

Aghion has a book called “the power of creative destruction.”

huitzitziltzin commented on The Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel 2025   nobelprize.org/prizes/eco... · Posted by u/k2enemy
jcattle · 2 months ago
I find macroeconomics fascinating. These theories to explain how growth works, what incentivizes it, where value comes from, I find them really fascinating.

It kind of echoes a common theme with LLMs, of humans creating systems that somehow work and only afterwards trying to make sense of why they work. We know that transformers are good at capturing context, and gradient descent is good at arriving at a working model of that context but how exactly this knowledge is being distilled and stored in an embedding space, no exact clue.

Is there some course which teaches the basics of macroeconomics?

huitzitziltzin · 2 months ago
You can start with a used copy of an older edition of mankiw’s text which is a standard undergrad reference.

Barro also has an old undergrad macro text which is good

The gap between undergrad macro and professional macro is extremely large. That shouldn’t dissuade you it’s just a note.

huitzitziltzin commented on The Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel 2025   nobelprize.org/prizes/eco... · Posted by u/k2enemy
huitzitziltzin · 2 months ago
Economist here…

An unexpected (to me!) prize but definitely a good one.

What’s notable is that mokyr’s research is very, very accessible to a layman. You can read his books and understand them nearly perfectly without needing substantial technical background. (Of course there’s a huge existing literature in economics and history he’s engaging with which you won’t know, but I’m not an economic historian either so a lot of it is unfamiliar to me too.). Try it! Hopefully you learn something.

Also the committee always releases a good non-technical summary of the laureates work and an even better “more technical” summary. You can start there for an overview.

As for the point which will be raised endlessly here that this is “not a real Nobel” - whatever. No one in the economics profession cares. Alfred Nobel doesn’t have a monopoly on prizes or priority to decide which fields are worth recognizing. It’s our highest prestige prize. Call it what you want.

huitzitziltzin commented on The Economic Impacts of AI: A Multidisciplinary, Multibook Review [pdf]   kevinbryanecon.com/BryanA... · Posted by u/cjbarber
Animats · 3 months ago
"This essay reviews seven books from the past dozen years by social scientists examining AI’s economic impact."

Going back that far may not be too helpful. Three years ago, ChatGPT wasn't out. A year ago, LLM-type AI only sort of worked. Now, it's reasonably decent in some areas. If you look at AI impacts retrospectively, you probably underestimate them.

huitzitziltzin · 3 months ago
If you read the review, you will see the author notes that issue pretty often and specifically discusses ways in which the oldest book he reviews (from 2014) both is and isn’t useful.

It’s worth reading

huitzitziltzin commented on Crossing the Atlantic Ocean. Alone. By Stand-Up-Paddleboard   zeroemissions.eu/en/ocean... · Posted by u/gnabgib
huitzitziltzin · 3 months ago
Why stand up and not use your legs at all?? People have rowed it.

This is a weird stunt that won’t prove anything. If he (magically) made it in a week people would still fly.

What’s the point? Don’t say “raising awareness”. Whose mind does the exercise have a chance of changing about what question? What behavioral change will that changed mind cause?

huitzitziltzin commented on The Job Market Is Hell   theatlantic.com/ideas/arc... · Posted by u/dcarmo
alephnerd · 3 months ago
> a paid internship at a civic-consulting firm, years of volunteering at environmental-defense organizations, experience working on farms and in parks as well as in offices, a close-to-perfect GPA, strong letters of recommendation

> He would do anything—filing paperwork, digging trenches—to build his dream career protecting California’s wildlife and public lands

> He applied to 200 jobs. He got rejected 200 times. Actually, he clarified, he “didn’t get rejected 200 times.” A lot of businesses never responded

I'm not sure this has anything to do with AI.

It's hard enough to land an environmental non-profit, state, or federal environmental job. It is doubly difficult to do so when both the Federal [0] and State [1] government are slashing hiring across the board.

This article is just "AI washing" austerity measures and offshoring that is occuring in the US.

[0] - https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/2025_United_States_federal_m...

[1] - https://www.pbs.org/newshour/politics/california-governor-ai...

huitzitziltzin · 3 months ago
Agree that these are very very hard industries in which to secure employment.

At the least the anecdote is not that informative about the effects of AI, given the details.

huitzitziltzin commented on What Happened When Mark Zuckerberg Moved in Next Door   nytimes.com/2025/08/10/us... · Posted by u/bookofjoe
huitzitziltzin · 4 months ago
The funniest thing about the reaction from all of his neighbors is that none of them are willing to do the one thing that really would annoy Zuckerberg and probably make him move: build multi story, multi tenant housing (i.e., small apartment buildings!) on plots he doesn’t already own.

Go to the city and ask for permission to replace two lots with five story apartment buildings with a view into his backyard. He’ll sue immediately and if he can’t stop it he’ll move.

No doubt it’s impossible to even get permission to do so (which is a separate problem!), but if those whiners really want revenge on the guy who they think “ruined their neighborhood” there’s one option they aren’t pursuing.

huitzitziltzin commented on Is economics education fit for the 21st century?   rethinkeconomics.org/reso... · Posted by u/pramodbiligiri
huitzitziltzin · 4 months ago
Entirely useless recommendations and very dubious empirical claims here. Let’s take them one at a time….

- “The climate crisis and socio-ecological issues are broadly absent from economic curricula.”

-> I don’t believe that for a second. Externalities are taught in every Econ 101 class I’ve ever heard of.

“75% of universities do not teach any ecological economics”

-> as a whole class maybe not but that doesn’t mean the material doesn’t get covered.

“ instead, when issues of ecological sustainability are taught, environmental damage is considered as something that needs to be priced into market mechanisms.”

-> which is a completely normal, standard idea among economists for good reason!

“Economics education does not address historical and contemporary power imbalances”

-> that’s not our job? Wtf - that’s not part of economics at all. Does it get covered in statistics? In history? I don’t know who’s responsible but it’s not us.

“55% of universities do not provide meaningful teaching on questions of historical slavery, colonialism, or neocolonialism at all. History and ethics are absent from these discussions.”

-> economics departments are not being held responsible for this supposed omissions but I really doubt this supposed fact is true. Does an American history class count or not ? It’s just not possible that slavery is not taught.

“Mainstream neoclassical economics dominates the economic theories taught.”

-> also a good sign as that’s the standard. We don’t teach Marxist thought anymore. That’s progress.

“Of the 480 theory modules we graded, 88.3% of them included mainstream neoclassical economic thinking focusing on rational, self-interested individuals.”

-> Show me any alternative that’s credible. Also: behavioral methods are widely taught. We are plenty criticism of our own models. That’s also Econ 101 material.

“They are almost entirely taught through quantitative technical skills.”

->. Good. Also: as opposed to…? What exactly?

“Economics is taught in isolation from other social sciences. The discipline of economics should be embedded within the social sciences, and students should be encouraged to learn across other disciplines such as politics, sociology, geography, and history, but for the most part, it remains siloed”

-> that’s true of what happens in every other department too. Leave it up to universities to set distribution requirements.

“There are two programmes that are critical, climate-conscious, and provide an economics education fit for the 21st century. SOAS and the University of Greenwich introduce students to a range of intellectual and methodological perspectives within the economics discipline. They put a learning focus on climate, power, and inequality throughout the course.”

-> eye roll.

u/huitzitziltzin

KarmaCake day2418October 26, 2020
About
Economist specializing in industrial organization and healthcare. (“Industrial organization” = “studying perfectly and (especially) imperfectly competitive markets, including antitrust issues.”) Formerly worked at a university in the northeast US, now work in industry.
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