The video of the event on Megan McArdle’s book is here. My talk starts about 26 minutes in, but I recommend listening to her talk, which starts about 2 minutes in.
If you want to watch Megan and Tyler Cowen discuss the book, you can check out this AEI event this evening at 5:30 eastern time–it will be shown live on line if you are nowhere near DC.
Incidentally, in 2004, I collected a series of essays that I had written, and I self-published a book. Prior to publication, I sent the manuscript to my former thesis adviser, Robert Solow, hoping he would write an endorsement that I could put on the cover. He sent me a peevish letter in response, saying that he looked at one of the first essays in the book and saw that one of my citations was to a “blogger,” and he thought that this showed a total lack of rigor and seriousness on my part.
That blogger was Megan McArdle.
What would Hanson say? Something about “lack of rigor and seriousness” having less to do with it than academic provincialism. Elsewhere I’ve said years ago “Someone get that woman a PhD.” And that was after her unfortunate comments about Ron Paul!
Seems to me that there were times in human history when credentials and institutional attachments weren’t the only or even main signals of being serious, rigourous, or otherwise important. (And in fact that’s still true in some fields.)
Perhaps the web can eventually bring that back….
Does anyone know how Megan’s book compare with Scott Adams’ book “How to Fail at Almost Everything and Still Win Big”?
So he was right!
No. Only in the sense that academics have to defend their ivory tower.
Compare Robert shiller to Tanta or Schiff or Shedlock. Schiller gets the Nobel prize because he is inside the castle..
One day someone might win a Nobel prize for bringing buffet/munger into academia. It won’t be buffet or munger and they won’t be able to cite buffet/munger appropriately.