Yearly Archives: 2015

Thinking and writing

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It was one of 20 minutes gaps between appointments, and of course I spent the time in a bookshop. I escaped with just one paperback, Steven Pinker’s [amazon_link id=”0241957710″ target=”_blank” ]The Sense of Style: The Thinking Person’s Guide to Writing in the 21st Century[/amazon_link]. To be honest, it was the cover image that sold it to me: I’m a sucker for monochrome photographs.

[amazon_image id=”0241957710″ link=”true” target=”_blank” size=”medium” ]The Sense of Style: The Thinking Person’s Guide to Writing in the 21st Century[/amazon_image]

Normally I don’t read how-to-write books. After all, I’ve been writing for aeons: school essays, 2 essays a week at university, a PhD dissertation (economics, but still, it had words), policy notes, client reports, magazine and newspaper articles, books. Just recently, though, I’ve read two excellent ones (the other being Oliver Kamm’s [amazon_link id=”0297871935″ target=”_blank” ]Accidence Will Happen[/amazon_link]).

[amazon_image id=”0297871935″ link=”true” target=”_blank” size=”medium” ]Accidence Will Happen: The Non-Pedantic Guide to English Usage[/amazon_image]

Pinker’s book is of course written with even more than his usual clarity and elegance. He makes it quite funny, too. The aspect I found most useful was the advice on writing to accommodate how our brains process language. This pertains to sentence structure, and also to the structure of longer pieces of text. Structure is absolutely the hardest aspect of any long piece of writing – the longer, the harder. This is because thinking is hard too. Clarity of thought and clarity of writing are strongly positively correlated.

[amazon_link id=”0241957710″ target=”_blank” ]The Sense of Style[/amazon_link] also has a long final section which runs through the usual questions: when to use ‘I’ or ‘me’; can you put prepositions at the end of sentences or start with a ‘but’ or ‘and’? I enjoyed the advice about the subjunctive mood because I had never known the difference between that and the use of ‘were’ (“If I were a rich man, dah di dah di dah di dah di dah di dah di dah di dah…”), the latter being in fact called ‘irrealis’. If that doesn’t entice you to buy the book, nothing will.

Being modest about economics

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“Economics is a wide enough subject already without having to include the whole of philosophy, psychology, sociology and human biology in addition. Let economists get on with their work, and let students of other social sciences get on with theirs.”

Colin Clark, [amazon_link id=”B0019XFB9M” target=”_blank” ]The Conditions of Economic Progres[/amazon_link]s, 1940

[amazon_image id=”B0006DB6N6″ link=”true” target=”_blank” size=”medium” ]The Conditions of Economic Progress[/amazon_image]

Sharks and economists

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I’m very much looking forward to hearing Joris Luyendijk talk about his book [amazon_link id=”1783350644″ target=”_blank” ]Swimming With Sharks[/amazon_link] at the Festival of Economics in Bristol next month. It’s an excellent piece of reportage on the City and the ways in which it traps its workers into certain forms of behaviour.

[amazon_image id=”1783350644″ link=”true” target=”_blank” size=”medium” ]Swimming With Sharks: My Journey into the World of the Bankers[/amazon_image]

However, Joris’s attack on economics in The Observer this weekend is, unfortunately, stuffed with all the false old chestnuts critics of the subject always trot out: economics is not objective like physics (string theory? hello?!); modelling involves the assumption that there are ‘timeless truths’ in economic behaviour; GDP is not an objective temperature measurement of the economy (I can recommend him [amazon_link id=”0691156794″ target=”_blank” ]an excellent book[/amazon_link] – by an economist – on that issue!)

[amazon_image id=”0691156794″ link=”true” target=”_blank” size=”medium” ]GDP: A Brief but Affectionate History[/amazon_image]

He writes: “Why should bankers ask themselves if a lucrative new complex financial product is safe when the models tell them it is? Why give regulators real power when models can do their work for them?” That question answers itself: because it was more profitable. Surely a sociologist of the City would find that almost nobody in banking gave much thought at all to the underlying economics of financial markets? Financial economists have much to answer for, but there is an odd tendency among critics of economics to attribute extraordinary power to  ‘the model’ rather than to politics or the sociology of financial institutions.

The article argues there should have been more research into the sociology and anthropology of the City. Quite right. But isn’t that what sociologists and anthropologists do? Economists like me have no training or experience in those research methods. I agree, too, that there are economists who disguise their politics as technocracy; I’d call them macroeconomists but some of them take umbrage when I do so. There is tons we don’t know about aggregate behaviour in actual economies. Neither that fact nor its acknowledgement make economics rubbish, or even unscientific. There is tons we don’t know about the natural world too. And by the way, physicists, biologists and chemists all use models. So do historians, just with words instead. Possibly even sociologists.

Don’t read me as saying economics has no criticisms to answer; it certainly does. But it is exasperating to read the same old same old nonsense from a critic who uses the misuse of one sub-field of economics by people in the financial markets to rubbish the whole subject, about which he seems to know very little. So I look forward to welcoming Joris to the Festival, where he’ll be able to hear a lot of economists engaging with the public, and talking about the environment, social mobility, immigration, the scope of government and many other issues.

Meanwhile, I agree with Dani Rodrik’s tweet:

rodrikdani
One reason I wrote Economics Rules is commentary like this, which misleads more than it illuminates https://t.co/y1v2dk5d76
11/10/2015 22:35

and recommend strongly his [amazon_link id=”0393246418″ target=”_blank” ]Economics Rules[/amazon_link]. I might buy a copy for Joris.

[amazon_image id=”0393246418″ link=”true” target=”_blank” size=”medium” ]Economics Rules: The Rights and Wrongs of the Dismal Science[/amazon_image]

Slightly scary AI

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On the whole I haven’t been among the most pessimistic people about the likely impact of a potential Artificial Intelligence revolution on the economy and life – although not blithely optimistic either about the scale of the adjustment that will be needed in labour markets and education. But [amazon_link id=”0300213557″ target=”_blank” ]Humans Need Not Apply: A Guide to Wealth and Work in the Age of Artificial Intelligence[/amazon_link] by Jerry Kaplan has made me more apprehensive. This is not because of anything he writes about the economy, which is standard fare, but rather because of something he says about AI in the first half of the book (quite a short and very readable volume).

[amazon_image id=”0300213557″ link=”true” target=”_blank” size=”medium” ]Humans Need Not Apply: A Guide to Wealth and Work in the Age of Artificial Intelligence[/amazon_image]

It starts with an account of high frequency trading and the Flash Crash of 2010. This will be familiar to anybody who has read Michael Lewis’s very entertaining [amazon_link id=”0241003636″ target=”_blank” ]Flash Boys[/amazon_link]. It seems pretty clear to me that financial regulators need to rein in HFT – not that they are showing any sign of interest in doing so – and there is even a proposed solution recommended in Al Roth’s terrific book about market structure, [amazon_link id=”000752076X” target=”_blank” ]Who Gets What and Why[/amazon_link], as well as in this volume. That is to regulate to allow computer trading to occur only once every second. This would re-create liquidity in the markets (which are illiquid at the milli- or nano-second timescale) and stop the speed arms race.

However, what Kaplan points out is that other AI applications will have undesirable consequences because they will look like the swarms of computers trading in financial markets, and doing it super-well with no application of judgment. One example is the use of AI to personalize the offers made to shoppers online, which will become so efficient that the synthetic intelligence will be able to price discriminate perfectly, extract all the consumer surplus in each market, and undo the hope that online retailing would lead to less rather than more price dispersion. Nobody will be forced to buy, of course. “But while you may exercise freedom as an individual, collectively we will not. Synthetic intellects are fully capable of managing the behaviour of groups to a fine statistical precision while permitting individuals to roam in whatever direction their predictable little hearts desire.”

The book asks many other thought-provoking questions about social norms and ethics. Will my personal robot be allowed to stand in a queue for me? Or repark my car to avoid tickets all day? How can we ensure robots understand what are the moral boundaries on their actions when they’ve been programmed to fulfil a certain kind of task?

It also has one interesting policy suggestion, the “job mortgage”, a means of allowing people to train and retrain without being tied to one specific employer: the government loans people money and is repaid from their subsequent earnings. This would replace the existing student loan schemes and apprenticeships, which Kaplan sees as too restrictive for the period of upheaval ahead.

There seem to be lots of books on this subject out now, but I thought this one worth a read, especially for an economist like me, as the author’s background is a technical one and he explains the technology trends very clearly.

Who will win the economics Nobel this year?*

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Monday sees the announcement of the 2015 prize winner. There are various tips around the place, some of which I’ve collected below. I think any of these would be a deserving winner – with links to various of their books too. Well worth reading, every one of them! There are surely other deserving candidates too.

I have been trying to think of women who are plausible winners, and there are certainly some younger ones who could win further down the line. Am I overlooking female economists who are old/distinguished/influential enough for this year?

Environmental economics: [amazon_link id=”0192853457″ target=”_blank” ]Partha Dasgupta[/amazon_link], [amazon_link id=”030021264X” target=”_blank” ]William Nordhaus[/amazon_link]

[amazon_image id=”0199267197″ link=”true” target=”_blank” size=”medium” ]Human Well-Being and the Natural Environment[/amazon_image]  [amazon_image id=”030018977X” link=”true” target=”_blank” size=”medium” ]The Climate Casino: Risk, Uncertainty, and Economics for a Warming World[/amazon_image]

Update: Twitter folks strongly recommend adding [amazon_link id=”0691159475″ target=”_blank” ]Martin Weitzman[/amazon_link] in this category.

[amazon_image id=”0691159475″ link=”true” target=”_blank” size=”medium” ]Climate Shock: The Economic Consequences of a Hotter Planet[/amazon_image]  [amazon_image id=”0674010442″ link=”true” target=”_blank” size=”medium” ]Income, Wealth and the Maximum Principle[/amazon_image]

Growth: Paul Romer, [amazon_link id=”0262522268″ target=”_blank” ]Robert Barro[/amazon_link]

[amazon_image id=”0262025531″ link=”true” target=”_blank” size=”medium” ]Economic Growth[/amazon_image]

Inequality: [amazon_link id=”0674504763″ target=”_blank” ]Anthony Atkinson[/amazon_link], [amazon_link id=”0691165629″ target=”_blank” ]Angus Deaton[/amazon_link]

[amazon_image id=”B00WQRFC30″ link=”true” target=”_blank” size=”medium” ]Inequality[/amazon_image]  [amazon_image id=”0691165629″ link=”true” target=”_blank” size=”medium” ]The Great Escape: Health, Wealth, and the Origins of Inequality[/amazon_image]

Innovation (and much else): [amazon_link id=”0300158327″ target=”_blank” ]Will Baumol [/amazon_link](now 93!)

[amazon_image id=”069111630X” link=”true” target=”_blank” size=”medium” ]The Free-Market Innovation Machine: Analyzing the Growth Miracle of Capitalism[/amazon_image]

Econometrics: [amazon_link id=”0521632420″ target=”_blank” ]David Hendry[/amazon_link]

[amazon_image id=”B00SLVVCF2″ link=”true” target=”_blank” size=”medium” ]Econometric Modeling: A Likelihood Approach: Written by David F. Hendry, 2014 Edition, Publisher: Princeton University Press [Paperback][/amazon_image]

Some are tipping [amazon_link id=”067443000X” target=”_blank” ]Thomas Piketty[/amazon_link] but that seems unlikely to me.

[amazon_image id=”067443000X” link=”true” target=”_blank” size=”medium” ]Capital in the Twenty-First Century[/amazon_image]

* Yes, I do know it isn’t a ‘proper’ Nobel Prize. People still seem to think it’s worth winning….