On Facebook, he writes,
The most overrated economist in the world is Daron Acemoglu; the most underrated may be Arnold Kling. For years, I’ve been getting more and more disillusioned with economics, as the noise of pointless rent-seeking “publications” (the term is a falsehood because articles are more public on SSRN than in a subscription journal) marginalizes fresh insight, and excessive respect (to the point of sycophancy) for legacy ideas and a few academic stars prevents newer and truer ideas from capturing the heart of the discipline. I’ve been wanting to write a book that builds economics from the ground up in a new way, rethinking the basics, selecting a truer set of ideas and integrating them into a new curriculum that would do more to help people understand capitalism… but what publisher would take me seriously? And then I found that Arnold Kling has written it! This is a well written book with good explanations, but more importantly, he picks the right ideas, the ones that aren’t just gimmicks or too unrealistic fort the gap with reality to be bridged, the ones that really matter and have limitless applications and are worth understanding and reflecting on. And then he sequences them well so that they build on each other. I’d like to see this book adapted to become the standard textbook for college freshmen studying economics. If you want to understand capitalism, this is the book I’d recommend.
He is plugging Specialization and Trade. So I’ll plug his (semi-dormant) blog, called Reinventing Economics.
Arnold, you could solve everything by coming up with theories that others could easily use to build complicated mathematical models. Nobel to follow.
With luck, economists will favor these new math models over other ways of understanding economies.
I see such sophistication in math that is not grounded in basic established principals (too many papers just plop down a lot of math without a rigorously derived justification)….then you get a profession that can’t agree on whether the price of labor affects demand for it. An outside observer looks at that and wonders why that doesn’t prompt a real reassessment of what economists have been doing….
Repeated trials make the specialist.
Repeated trials and elastic inventory. Moments of surplus inventory allow experiments with repeated trials. Repeated trials is the missing theory, self conscious practice is what specialization is about.
The prisoner type games are discovered, even created by, repeated trials. The dilemma is that the players are done playing, repeated trials fixed the specializations, and the game no longer needed, it leads to dilemma.
I think you’re under rated, too, and your book is great.
It should be a required reading in any Economics major.