Readers,
I am working on the idea of a retrospective, a sort of “greatest hits” collection of my writings.
My current thought is to have a set of short pieces, about one to four pages each. Each essay would be built around one of my sayings, such as “information wants to be free, but people need to get paid” or “the null hypothesis” or “price discrimination explains everything.”
What I am asking from you is to remind me of sayings that you think are worth including, or favorite blog posts or essays of mine.
Leave your suggestions as comments.
Thanks for your help.
“Markets fail. Use markets.”
“The knowledge-power discrepancy”
“Evolution, not intelligent design, is how societies advance.”
Second “Markets fail. Use markets”. One of my favorite, succinct, thought-provoking sentences from Kling.
“Null hypothesis watch” is a noun phrase and needs to be tweaked into sentence with a verb. It’s a useful concept.
Slate Star Codex has a variant on a sub-theme: “If there’s any possible way that it can be selection bias, it’s selection bias.”
Perhaps if you don’t have a short catchy phrase it could be “Nobody expects the Null Hypothesis.” That’s lame. “Null Hypothesis Wins Again” is catchier. IDK. But it’s good for looking at things like universal pre-K, etc.
I’m agnostic about which ideas need phrasing as a sentence including a verb and which ones can be summarized with a label, typically a classificatory noun or noun phrase.
One that was drilled into my head is “Harberger’s Postulate.”
Also there is Director’s Law.
Both of those I would conjure from my free memory as declarative sentences, for example, “If you multiply a lot of fractions together you get a very small number.”
“Causal density” (a phrase, not a saying).
good.
BTW, I’ve seen not simply “Confirmation Bias” but it expanded into the sentence, “Confirmation Bias is a b*tch.”
Causal Density is a Rorschach Test.
Causal Density Muddies the Waters.
Causal Density Spawns Ideological Food Fights
“what we tend to see is individuals enjoying balance sheets with riskless assets and risky liabilities, while financial institutions have the reverse”
https://www.econlib.org/archives/2011/06/government_and_1.html
Suits vs. geeks.
Second vote for this also. Aptly describes most, or even all, of my work history.
Favorite blog post: “The Toady Class On Average is Over”
Garrett Jones economy
“Consider two ways of getting a computer to print out that the stimulus created 1.6 million jobs. Method one is to set up an elaborate computer simluation that produces such a result. Method two is to type “the stimulus created 1.6 million jobs” into a word processor and hit the print key. The only difference between those two ways is the amount of computer processing time involved.”
https://www.econlib.org/archives/2010/02/macroeconometri_1.html
Ooh, that’s good! Reminds me of a friend who used to refer to computer models as elaborate random-number generators. He was referring to things like unsaturated-zone water flow and contaminant transport, but it’s even truer of economic modeling.
Although not a saying, my favorite Klingism is:
When there are good or bad trends in society, there is always a good economic reason for this.
(In terms of bad trends liberals focus on income inequality while conservatives focus on decline of religion.)
Otherwise, the failure to disprove the null hypothesis is second favorite Klingism. (Say when I review the economic literature on the impact of immigration on native wages, I find both pro-Immigration and anti-Immigration fail to disprove the null hypothesis.)
If I were to ask the opposite of reviewing Klingism but what is missed most often, is how much economics both influences and is influenced by other social science. Economics can not exist without Political Science, Sociology and other areas.
From Specialization and Trade”
“As outsiders, economists see some of the conditions in a market, but they omit other factors. In that regard, economists are no different from other outsiders. To the extent there are outsiders who see a flaw in how the market serves consumers, those outsiders have the option of starting a business to address the problem. That’s what entrepreneurs do all the time. And they are the main engine of economic progress. However, entrepreneurs are often mistaken, and new businesses often fail. By the same token, economists and policy makers are also capable of making errors. What we should be comparing is not the existing market configuration, with an ideal based on a simple model, but the market process of error-correction with the political process of error correction.”
Error correction is the HUGE advantage markets always have in the medium term over other systems.
Markets fail.
Everything fails.
Use Markets – they correct errors best.
What I like about the quote is the element of comparison which would seem to be more persuasive than the naked slogan “markets fail, use markets, especially when dealing with the type of person who uses the phrase “market fundamentalism” as if though that were a bad thing.
Road to Sociology Watch
Something along the lines of ‘Being charitable to those who disagree”.
Here is one I liked from 2009:
https://www.econlib.org/archives/2009/08/what_is_real_fr.html
The key quote: “real freedom is the absence of monopoly.”
Whatever happened to the four forces?
New Commanding Heights.
Teaching equals feedback.
GDP factory economics.
Govt’s MO is to subsidise demand, restrict supply
Good. This is in the top ten. And note that it has verbs. Sorry to harp on this, but verbs matter.
Road to Sociology. Ok–Road to Sociology what? Can we have a verb?
Arnold will know the context
Narrower, Deeper, Older for sure. It’s an idea and observation that could easily be explored at book length if you were so inclined.
Also, the “Shift to Intangibles.”
The Three Languages of Politics
Easy to fix versus hard to break.
Merle Kling’s Law.
I’m interested in your criticism’s of Scott Sumner’s monetary economics.
This was originally Russ Roberts idea in his 12 Rules for Life, but I like how you put it better:
Short saying that has stuck in my head since I read it: Funerals are deeply life-affirming.
Your original full paragraph:
“Funeral services are deeply life-affirming. Eulogies provide a valuable perspective on life. They remind you of what is important. They remind you of what is best in people. And they tell stories of the variety of human experience.”
“intention heuristic” is the first thing to come to mind
Not exactly short and pithy, but good points from Specialization and Trade:
1. “The central planners in a command economy, as in any individual firm or organization, will tend to fear experimentation.” [from Specialization and Trade]
2. Our disposition to favor restrictions in the markets where we produce. [from Specialization and Trade]
3. Your idea (in multiple places) of subsidizing demand and simultaneously restricting supply.
4. Human Beings are Social. Doesn’t mean economics is invalid.
Have a nice day
The Fundamental Social Rule: reward cooperators and punish defectors.