economics - where to begin?

For someone coming from a more philosophical background, I think Steve Randy Waldman's blog might be of interest. He sometimes steps back and unpacks the philosophical assumptions behind economic concepts in a way that's helpful for an outsider. He doesn't post as much any more, but if you start digging through his archives, you'll probably turn up something interesting. Here's a series of posts he did on welfare economics, as a taster:

http://www.interfluidity.com/v2/5149.html

those are great posts but way tl;dr for the point he's making

Maybe not his most concise writing, but hey it's a blog. Here's one which I think is a bit pithier, on optimal taxation of capital:

http://www.interfluidity.com/v2/4218.html

Oh shit.

John "Most studies are false" Ioannidis comes for economics https://t.co/6RDqN5t2uH ht @UCBITSS pic.twitter.com/RUYweSYaTJ

— Lee Crawfurd (@leecrawfurd) October 25, 2017

with apologies to flopson - unlearning economics' 111 criticisms of economics here.

i don't understand quite a few of them. several hit the point i was cackhandledly trying to make upthread.

4. Embeds libertarianism, consumerism and capitalism into models without questioning them
5. Excessively 'thin' conception of the environment as amenable to cost-benefit analysis, no acknowledgement of how ecosystems work
12. No real concept of the social. Putting 'identity' in a utility function doesn't count
35. Crises are not exogenous shocks
88. The overarching idea that 'competition is good' ignores the many cases where it is negative (such as arms races)

and a few i hadn't thought of, but i thought were good:

53. In general, workplace dynamics are absent (except in terms of contract efficiency)
49. With the way it’s taught, people who learn it often cannot think any other way. It is difficult to do even if you want to
60. Subjective well-being research has yet to tell us anything we didn’t already know
84. Where are the activist economists? Global slavery, meat-eating, the environment, are all both huge economic and huge moral issues

My contrib rn is this article that Flopson sent me a while back, which I do like, on profit under Socialism.

No real concept of the social.

otmfm x 10

what's a good short book about the uh let's call it perfect-information ideal market transaction model

Try something from Stiglitz maybe?

Stiglitz is imperfect information, also i don't recommend any of his books (his papers from the 70s are excellent)

one interpretation of j.'s question is: the book you are looking for is Debreu - Theory of Value

iirc u are a former mathematician, so it will be legible to you. i've never read it but it's the kind of old theory book people say things like 'for 100 pages of differential topology it reads just like a novel' about

lol gotta love a book that starts out with 20 pages of definitions of 'set' and 'function', takes me back

i will take a look but i don't really need to know that much, just how economists talk about the concepts involved

found some ethicists deploying this model in a blase way and i, knowing zilch BUT being aware that work on imperfect information is PLENTY OLD by now, was like uhhhhh we're doing this why now?

bc of market failure?

no bc business ethicists are slaves to free market ideology

lmao oh yeah that

just how economists talk about the concepts involved

outside libertarians, the perfect markets things are benchmark models. economists add the imperfection they judge relevant in context. in mainstream macroeconomics a common departure is to assume credit markets are incomplete (so some people cannot insure themselves) or that labour markets have 'search frictions' (costly for firms to fill vacancies. pretty much all of economics is 'which departure from benchmark is the relevant one'. sometimes you invoke multiple imperfections but it can get 'intractable'

i recommend the book Economics Rules by Dani Rodrik

i don't think i saw this post at the time. this guy muted me on twitter (for a lighthearted and clever zing smh) so i'll reply here

4. Embeds libertarianism, consumerism and capitalism into models without questioning them

true to some extent. but it's not always clear how else to proceed. imo economists are wary of paternalism to an extreme degree, and i consider that a virtue. it would be extremely weird for an economist to propose a policy like 'stop consuming so much dross, sheeple', that seems outside our purview somehow. to the extent that that 'embeds libertarianism, consumerism and capitalism' i don't think it's a bad thing. the focus of economics is about collective choice (policy) not individual choice. another thing that's obvious but still worth mentioning, is that models embed capitalism because we are in capitalism and economists (try to) study the economy as it currently exists; in the 70s and 80s you could find papers about central planning in top american journals. so i think it's more of a demand than supply thing. (also, scandinavian countries are disproportionately studied relative to population or gdp--mostly because they have incredible data)

5. Excessively 'thin' conception of the environment as amenable to cost-benefit analysis, no acknowledgement of how ecosystems work

people do try to do this but it's insanely hard

12. No real concept of the social. Putting 'identity' in a utility function doesn't count

people do try to do this but it's insanely hard. economists tend to be hardasses and without good evidence

35. Crises are not exogenous shocks

i agree with this in a sense. but to some extent 'exogenous shock' is a tautology, like what's the distinction between 'shock' and 'initial condition'?

88. The overarching idea that 'competition is good' ignores the many cases where it is negative (such as arms races)

imo economics clarifies these rather than ignores them

53. In general, workplace dynamics are absent (except in terms of contract efficiency)

true this is a hole in the literature. hard to study

49. With the way it’s taught, people who learn it often cannot think any other way. It is difficult to do even if you want to

i'm not sure that there is 'another way' to think about it, tbh. like there are no 'untrained' economic geniuses, even brilliant finance bros often have horrible ideas about economics. i agree that thinking purely in terms of 'rigorous' models can be a straightjacket, and it's certainly important to be able to loosen up and think more informally for creative thinking. i think someone like Chris Dillow is a good example of someone who knows tonnes of economic theory but thinks very flexibly.

60. Subjective well-being research has yet to tell us anything we didn’t already know

this is wrong as stated. maybe it hasn't told us anything we didn't already guess. this kind of argument is really dumb

84. Where are the activist economists? Global slavery, meat-eating, the environment, are all both huge economic and huge moral issues

agree with this. culturally there is a norm against stridency that goes too far, into status quo bias

*economists tend to be hardasses and without good evidence or data research projects tend to die off

xps thx flopson, i'll take a look

not sure of the ultimate provenance - seems probable that it is due primarily to friedman and hayek, esp. 'pop' work? - but business ethics authors, the main people in my life who force me to learn anything about econ, seem to default to using a strongly libertarian construal of every economic concept they employ, not sure whether it's because they're not-so-closet libertarians themselves or because they're trying to make what they take to be good or bad faith gestures toward including business essentials in otherwise serious discussions of (ethical) value.

ya 'business ethicist' sound like some kind of unholy euphemism

murder doctor

i believe in a leftish interpretation of the Milton Friedman argument against Corporate Social Responsibility/Business Ethics

In a free economy there is one and only one social responsibility of business―to use its resources and engage in activities designed to increase its profits ... It is the responsibility of the rest of us to establish a framework of law such that an individual in pursuing his own interest is, to quote Adam Smith again, ‘led by an invisible hand to promote an end which was no part of his intention.'

Friedman's interpretation was that the only framework of law necessary was a whiggish minimalist protection of property rights. my interpretation agrees that firms can fundamentally only be self-interested, and the only way to bend them away from destructive self-interest is through regulation (whether rules, pigouvian taxation, direct oversight, or active structuring of markets will depend case-by-case). any self-imposed business ethics or corporate social responsibility can only be a scam to divert attention from the actual crimes of self-interest, and to make the public think active regulation isn't necessary because of their benevolence

bakan-style

Flopson : what's good to read about secular stagnation now? Is there such a thing?

tx for these posts flopson, and for picking up that old post. as i’ve probably said upthread, still grappling in a non-expert way with these concepts, so yr even-handed and thoughtful responses are v useful.

Flopson : what's good to read about secular stagnation now? Is there such a thing?

xps jim- i think secstag is kind of over now that Larry Summers has given up on it since Trump got elected? imo there is a fun demand-side version of secstag, for me the most useful for thinking about that whole line of argument was to read about Japan (i recommend Richard Koo 'The Holy Grail of Macroeconomics - Lessons from Japan’s Great Recession' with the caveat that some people strongly disagree with Koo so after reading it seek out some critiques) then there's the boring supply-side version where technology is stagnant (or maybe we're not measuring it properly blahblahblah) and for that i would read the second half of Robert Gordon's long-ass book from a couple of years ago

so Growth as a standalone topic in mainstream macroeconomics is, as far as i can tell, kind of over? with Paul Romer endogenous growth theory being the last great hope that failed. afaict the current interesting growth stuff is split across macro-development, resurgence in economic history (read/follow @pseudoerasmus if interested in these 2), and micro innovation policy (which connects to macro growth through 'neo-Schumpeterian' models, most famous of which is Aghion-Howitt. i'm actually not entirely sure how active this area is, could still be a thing). i actually kind of think the retreat of growth is a good thing tbh, a lot of the classic growth papers are really dumb like throwing a bunch of countries into a data-set and regressing growth rate on covariates. a good recent example of the development-historical approach is an incredible paper on South Korea's big push (summary by the author here https://voxdev.org/topic/firms-trade/manufacturing-revolutions-role-industrial-policy-south-korea-s-industrialisation)

i'm not sure what post-growth means, but i do think it's extremely important to argue against degrowth nutsos. there's a fun recent series of blog posts by Branko Milanovic trolling degrowth ppl with some growth arithmetic beginning with this one: http://glineq.blogspot.ca/2017/11/the-illusion-of-degrowth-in-poor-and.html and one of my favourite more speculative essays is 'Economics in the Age of Abundance' by brad delong https://www.project-syndicate.org/commentary/economic-problems-age-of-abundance-by-j--bradford-delong-2016-01?barrier=accessreg . i strongly dislike and avoid Paul Mason and that whole lot

Aghion

by the way this guy is extremely French and insanely funny manic gesticulating public speaker, some v worthwhile videos of his talks on youtube. he'll win nobel prize in ~10-15 years

FP for bakan

Double thumbs up for neo-schumpeterianism

i actually didn't know Bakan by name (obv recognize the cover of The Corporation tho i've never read it) but i can see the building his office is in from mine!

you'd love Philippe Aghion, darragh

What's it gonna take for you to trip him on the street from me I can paypal

xp I noted him as of five mins ago ta

you some kinda friend of the corporation buddy

huh Agaion sounds interesting. the son of a communist too!

I think I've noted my history with bakan/the corporation elsewhere I'll see if I can find it

is there a cool think to read that treats flows of human capital as functions of time

saskia sassen?

Help me understand: why is a trade war bad when you have a trade deficit? Why wouldn't tariffs help us more than they hurt us?

i can give a longer answer when im not on my phone. imports appear to enter negatively into Y = C + I + G + (X - M) but this is a fallacy since imports are consumed or invested. the intuition is to think about a company instead of a nation: you have a ‘trade deficit’ with amazon, but taxing amazon goods would only make you worse off

Adam Tooze is very good at explaining this type of shit, I sometimes find. But at other times I haven't got a fucking clue what he's talking about.

i find him often impenetrable tbh

xp but I can't possibly produce the stuff I buy from amazon so I don't see how that analogy applies.

I mean I understand the very simple concept that a tariff makes imported goods more expensive for me, that's not what I'm asking about

can you clarify what you’re asking?

he appears to assume a trade deficit is hurtful and reducing it is a Good Thing in itself, and that "a trade war" mainly consists of attempts to reduce a trade deficit by reducing imports, and therefore may be an attractive remedy for the trade deficit. but because he also hears that a trade war is a Bad Thing, he wants to know why that would be true.

is that about right, man alive?

but I can't possibly produce the stuff I buy from amazon so I don't see how that analogy applies.

― Fedora Dostoyevsky (man alive), Monday, June 18, 2018 5:27 PM (six minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

you could buy them from somewhere else. since you are not presently doing that, it’s prob cheapest from amazon. if the tariff causes you to buy from someone else more expensive that just deepens another deficit. if you instead make it yourself you’d reduce tariffs but decrease consumption.

sry reduce trade deficit

But I’m just a consumer, I’m not an economy. What if purchasing from the other merchant also increased my own wages?

I mean I have a rough idea of Ricardo’s theory of comparative advantage but it doesn’t seem to play out in reality as manufacturing moving to China and agriculture moving to Mexico seems to have made us poorer.