@alexolegimas Which debate? — Mercifully I’m not on Twitter frequently enough. I learned a lot from Tyler Cowen, and btw, his “Modern Principles of Economics” textbook with Alex Tabarrok is outstanding.
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Günter J. Hitsch
817 posts
I have never met or interacted much with Tyler Cowen, but to say he was a huge influence is an understatement. My path to economics was very non traditional—I was pre med and spent two years after undergrad working on a startup turning EEG signals into biometric tech.
That’s when I got hooked on Tyler’s blog. It had a profound influence on my understanding of what questions economists could ask and what tools they had to answer them. At some point I realized that my startup was not going to make it. I wasn’t upset. I had already decided to go to grad school in economics (after also finding Thaler’s work).
I think Tyler had this influence on many others.
T. Greer@Scholars_Stage
Thoughts on the Cowen debate: 1) I think Cowen looked at the world in the aughts and realized “I can be a normal economist or the world’s most influential blogger” and he clearly chose the latter. This was a good choice, and has led him to great heights. 2) Breadth is its own sort of depth, and the world has great need of generalists who actually do the reading 3) One reason #2 matters: most public intellectuals of a certain stature—the stature where they are invited to dinner parties with fancy people—are reduced to publicly recycling the opinions of the other dinner guests. There are lots of reasons why that happens but one obvious one is that the pundits in question don’t actually have the breadth of experience or reading to reflect on dinner party opinion. Tyler is this one of the few public intellectuals whose opinions are reliably made better because of his access to the high and mighty. 4) There is probably no academic in America who has a larger number of mentees; I cannot think of any academic who has jump-started more careers than Cowen has. It was only possible because of reasons 1-3. This is a significant achievement. It will be his greatest legacy. Full disclosure: I have received grants from Cowen myself so I am biased in the ways you would expect.
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Günter J. Hitsch retweetledi
Hummm... Let me think this through ...So when tariffs go down, prices decrease. Could it be that when tariffs go up, prices increase?
H/t @Birdyword
Eric Daugherty@EricLDaugh
🚨 BREAKING: In a major development, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent confirms the PRICE OF COFFEE will go down after an impending announcement for tariff relief "You're gonna see SUBSTANTIAL announcements over the next couple days for things we don't grow in the U.S. Coffee, bananas, other fruits, things like that. That will bring the prices down VERY quickly." HUGE!
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@OlegUrminsky @btshapir The goal justifies the authoritarian means. Where else have I seen this lately?
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@btshapir @Guenter_Hitsch Trying to increase public school spending and fund pension obligations somehow does. It's all in the framing, I guess.
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I knew nothing about this guy really. But it's hard not to respect this answer.
Nate Friedman@NateFriedman97
I asked Curtis Sliwa "are you okay with losing and knowing you contributed to Mamdani's victory?" I did my best to relay the concerns of capitalist america and used @BillAckman's tweet as a reference "a vote for Curtis Sliwa is a vote for Zohran Mamdani" This was Sliwa's response.
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@Guenter_Hitsch @btshapir Definitely *not* what I said. I would think that the tradeoff between "crazy media personality who has never had a political constituency" vs. "politician with potentially outlier views" question is pretty settled at this point, but that's just me.
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@btshapir So who would you vote for among the _eligible candidates_ in the NY election?
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@OlegUrminsky @btshapir I fully agree. Or, expressed differently, much better than Mamdami or Brandon Johnson.
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@btshapir He's an absolute nut and would be a ridiculous mayor. But it is a great answer.
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Günter J. Hitsch retweetledi
in 2011, the president of antifa hired me to give fashion consultancy to the organization. i recommended everyone wear navy suits with tan shoes, dress sneakers, and golf polos with slim chinos. if you arrested everyone today wearing these things, you'd destroy antifa
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@BrianCAlbrecht I 💯 disagree. If you strategically avoid criticism you create bad science and you should not be an academic.
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@itaisher What is true, however, is that Economists could do a much better job making their ideas more comprehensible to the general public.
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@itaisher I’m trying to understand how you get triggered by an article that has been written again and again for decades. "Economic theory bad, need better economic theory." 😎
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@itaisher Is there a concrete example you have in mind?
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A point worth making:
Suppose a policy would make everyone worse off but increase fairness.
An economist would typically say we shouldn’t do it, and they may be right.
But it is important to recognize that even that is a value judgment and not merely technical expertise.
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@bendreyfuss Well, you got a sense of humor. Most people who’re online all the time don’t, and it makes them insufferable 😉
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I love Taylor even though I increasingly disagree with every opinion she has lol but where I really think this thread misses the mark is: I think both Taylor and I are examples of the dangers of being online. It helped our careers. But she and I are in different ways both insane
Taylor Lorenz@TaylorLorenz
It’s wild how much people project on to me and my relationship w the internet. I use the internet for reporting to share my thoughts and make connections, but I am one of the most private people online about my actual life. None of these people know a single thing about me
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@MeganTStevenson Fine, but concerns about statistical power should be ex-ante, not ex-post considerations. Like, you dismiss an imprecise null even though the imprecise yet statistically significant result gets accepted.
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The catch is that econ methods are systematically underpowered, so most null results are too imprecise to be very informative. (Same is true for statistically significant results, but we seem to ignore that.)
Philipp Heimberger@heimbergecon
Statistically insignificant results are at least as interesting as significant ones (but often end up in the file drawer because deemed less publishable). Results are interesting if they change what we believe. No reason that only non-zero findings should change our beliefs.
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@sc_cath @wwwojtekk Good point! My view: If a paper asks an uninteresting question then it should be desk rejected. But if we care about the answer to the question, then we should be publishing null effects, and not just effects different from zero.
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@wwwojtekk Why is a non-zero informative in these circumstances?
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I completely agree that a tightly estimated zero answer to an interesting question is informative. The problem with applying this too broadly though is that many papers ask contrived or uninteresting questions or do a poor job, so that zeros there are just not that interesting
Philipp Heimberger@heimbergecon
Statistically insignificant results are at least as interesting as significant ones (but often end up in the file drawer because deemed less publishable). Results are interesting if they change what we believe. No reason that only non-zero findings should change our beliefs.
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My colleague Anil Kashyap and Ken Griffin (I don’t think they’re on Twitter) on the importance of Fed independence:
wsj.com/opinion/trumps…
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In addition to all the issues mentioned by @paulnovosad , it would be good if editors, reviewers, etc. were a bit more suspicious of papers that sound like someone is pulling your leg
Paul Novosad@paulnovosad
David Roodman writes: consumers of economic research are more truth-seeking than the producers. Here is Roodman's recap of his re-analysis of a set of papers on temperature and judge decision-making. The comment process is not working that well! Gory details in 🧵 1/
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How it was possible to consume an order of magnitude more when GDP per capita was an order of magnitude less is truly a fascinating economic question.
Christopher F. Rufo ⚔️@christopherrufo
I'm constantly amazed that when America's GDP per capita was an order of magnitude lower than it is now, we produced homes, neighborhoods, and civic spaces that were an order of magnitude more beautiful than we do now
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Günter J. Hitsch retweetledi
Deeply concerned to hear about the deeply concerning GPS interference that diverted @vonderleyen's flight. Europe stands united in expression of deep concerns and must commit to the deployment of ever-deepening concerns moving forward.
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