Bart J. Wilson

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Bart J. Wilson

Bart J. Wilson

@bartwilson

Professor of Economics & Law, Chapman University | Author of Meaningful Economics, The Property Species, & Humanomics https://t.co/uFAQImJKSO

Orange, CA Beigetreten Mart 2008
225 Folgt1K Follower
Bart J. Wilson
Bart J. Wilson@bartwilson·
Economics has no comparable mechanism to subsume prior work. What actually happens when economists stop reading old work is they forget prior work. Distinctions get flattened and the profession moves on as if the earlier insights had been absorbed when they were merely abandoned.
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Bart J. Wilson
Bart J. Wilson@bartwilson·
In physics, later frameworks genuinely subsume earlier ones in a formally demonstrable way. Newtonian mechanics is derivable as a limiting case of general relativity. You can prove that nothing was lost. The later theory contains the earlier one.
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Bart J. Wilson retweetet
Peter Boettke
Peter Boettke@PeterBoettke·
Of course, this is how science progresses. But tools must be appropriate to tasks. Hayek’s insights might push toward a different set of conceptual tools to be utilized in science than Samuelson suggested let alone what Keynes suggested. Tools must be used in service of the insights put forth, not the other way around.
alberto bisin@albertobisin

In my view the answer here is correct, reporting preferences is impossible and hence central planning is no go. But the question is not: why should we care about Hayek’s argument - we should thank him for posing this fundamental question and address it ourselves with our best conceptual tools.

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Bart J. Wilson
Bart J. Wilson@bartwilson·
Whence the problem? Economists too often prioritize clean optimization over the messy causal story of human conduct.
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Bart J. Wilson
Bart J. Wilson@bartwilson·
Someone should study online price discrimination with preferences and costs held fixed. Two decades ago reviewers waved it off as speculation. Now you can watch it happen with the refresh button. onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.109…
James Shields@scaling_shields

i watched a flight go from $483 to $547 in 24 hours WITHOUT a single seat selling searched london to new york on a tuesday $483 checked again 2 hours later $512 next morning: $547 panicked and booked it the guy sitting next to me paid $391 same seat, date + airline $156 less he searched once i searched 3 times the algorithm saw me come back and charged me until i broke the seat doesnt have a price you have a price and it goes up EVERY time you show interest couldnt stop thinking about it so i tracked down someone who actually built pricing algorithms for a european carrier asked him what happened to me "you got profiled. the system assigned you an intent score after your second search and raised your ceiling every time you came back" asked how to beat it "most people think a VPN fixes it. thats 2015 advice. the algorithm fingerprints more than your IP now. it reads your device your browser your screen resolution your timezone. VPN to bucharest but your clock says london and your language is english? the algo knows youre faking and sometimes charges you more for trying" "so what actually works?" "you have to poison the entire profile. not just the location. the identity" the protocol he gave me: VPN AND match your timezone and language to the spoofed location. mismatched signals flag you and can trigger a price increase use a fully clean browser. no history no saved passwords no google account. the algorithm fingerprints your session not just your cookies one search one booking. the intent score activates on the second search. there is no safe way to look twice book tuesday or wednesday 1-5am. lowest traffic means the least demand data for the algorithm to inflate against if the price already spiked go dark for 72 hours minimum. not 24. the intent score on most carriers decays on a 3 day cycle. come back on a different device from a different network "we spent $4 billion building these systems. theyre not going to lose to someone who opened an incognito tab" $900 billion industry the gap between what you pay and what the person next to you pays is not a bug its the entire business model stop letting an algorithm charge you for being predictable

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Bart J. Wilson
Bart J. Wilson@bartwilson·
My uncomfortable take: economists may be reacting a bit like artists because economics mostly involves the careful construction of representations—models, measures, designs, narratives—rather than the straightforward pursuit of truth we imagine it to be.
Andrey Fradkin@AndreyFradkin

Our excellent conversation with @ben_golub is dropping tomorrow in all fine podcast players. Here's Ben discussing the implications of economic theory slop, and why some economists are reacting like artists rather than scientists.

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Bart J. Wilson
Bart J. Wilson@bartwilson·
@smithdanj I read The Scope and Method of Political Economy last year and made a mental note to dissect his philosophy of science later. I’d love to read whatever you’re doing with him.
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Daniel J. Smith
Daniel J. Smith@Smithdanj·
John Neville Keynes developing early humanomics?
Daniel J. Smith tweet mediaDaniel J. Smith tweet mediaDaniel J. Smith tweet mediaDaniel J. Smith tweet media
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Bart J. Wilson
Bart J. Wilson@bartwilson·
The respondent’s “desirable” answer isn’t a retreat from truth but a social truth—a harmony-preserving reading of the situation.
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Bart J. Wilson
Bart J. Wilson@bartwilson·
Meaningful Economics is now available as an audiobook! If you use Spotify and would like a gratis copy, DM me for a download code.
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Bart J. Wilson
Bart J. Wilson@bartwilson·
To be clear: I have a stake in this distinction. Humanomics, The Property Species, and Meaningful Economics are dissenting projects, so I’m not neutral about how we talk about “normal science” and mainstream views.
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Bart J. Wilson
Bart J. Wilson@bartwilson·
To say “I want books that reflect normal science” is, in Kuhnian terms, to say “I want books that reproduce the current paradigm’s commitments and blind spots.” That may be locally rational, but it’s systematically resistant to the kinds of dissent that turn out to be crucial.
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Bart J. Wilson
Bart J. Wilson@bartwilson·
This post treats “normal science” as if it meant “reliable consensus truth,” but for Kuhn it’s paradigm-bound puzzle-solving. The post quietly slides from a sociological claim about what scientists do to an epistemic claim about what’s true. That move needs argument.
Jesús Fernández-Villaverde@JesusFerna7026

A genuine question: How can you tell when a science book written for the general public is good and reflects the mainstream view of the best researchers in the field (what Thomas Kuhn would have called “normal science”)? I ask because I often compare this with economics. There are fantastic books on economics for a general audience. For example, The Winner’s Curse: Behavioral Economics Anomalies, Then and Now by @R_Thaler and @alexolegimas, which came out a couple of months ago, is genuinely good. I would recommend it to anyone interested in the state of behavioral economics. But I can also cite many other popular economics books that are not very good, or worse, present what I think is a highly idiosyncratic or even misleading view of the field. This happens even with books published by the best university presses (Princeton, MIT, Yale, Oxford, Cambridge) and written by authors with impeccable credentials (professorships at top institutions, prizes galore, …). A few years ago, I stopped reading science books for the general public after realizing (thanks to conversations with people I trust) that several titles I had read did not reflect the mainstream view in their disciplines. Let me be precise about the concern. Define b as the event “best theory to account for the existing empirical observations” (where I am being vague about what “best” means, no need to enter into such a discussion today). I am not claiming that the mainstream view is always b. History shows many cases in which non-mainstream theories were “better,” though this was usually recognized only after new evidence emerged. In real time, the mainstream view was often still the best bet. But thinking about this in Bayesian terms: while P(mainstream = b) < 1, it is also true that P(alternativeᵢ | mainstream ≠ b) <<< 1. In words: if the mainstream view is wrong, the chance that any specific alternative is the correct one is still close to zero. There are always 100 alternatives. Time is limited. For an outsider, the rule-of-thumb “your best bet is the mainstream view” probably makes sense. So the question is: how do you tell whether that new book on archaeology, quantum mechanics, or neuroscience—promoted this holiday season by a top university press—is actually worth the ten hours you would spend reading it?

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