Category Archives: Economic education and methods

AEA Conference Highlights On Line

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Tyler Cowen speaks on a panel on media and economics. He gives a very optimistic take, based on the availability of blogs, Twitter, and online education.

The fact that the panel is online is an example of what he is talking about. It is one of five highly-rated panels from the recent American Economic Association conference. All of them are self-recommending.

I have only been to the AEA meetings once or twice since graduate school. A few economists really love it. They get a sort of “high” from the crowd. I do not. For me, folk dancing with a large crowd is fun, but milling around a hotel with economists is not.

So using these videos to attend the AEA meetings virtually is a win-win for me.

Tyler Cowen on James Buchanan

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He writes,

He thought through the conflict between subjective and objective notions of value in economics, and the importance of methodologically individualist postulates, more deeply than perhaps any other economist. Most economists hate this work, or refuse to understand it, either because it lowers their status or because it is genuinely difficult to follow or because it requires philosophy.

This is the aspect of Buchanan that I picked up on, but that is only one of 13 items in Tyler’s post.

Unpacking the Term “Probability”

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My new essay on probability concludes:

Producers and consumers live in a world of non-repeatable events…Treating probabilities as if they were objective is a conceptual error. It is analogous to the conceptual errors that treat value as objective…We will be less likely to overstate the robustness of equilibrium and the precision of economic models if we stop conflating subjective degrees of conviction with verifiable scientific concepts of probability.

I argue that one cannot assign an objective probability to a non-repeatable event, such as “will hurricane Sandy cause flooding in the New York subway system?” I could have used “Will Barack Obama win re-election?” as my illustrative example, given that Nathan Singer Silver famously assigned a very precise-sounding probability to that event.

Recycling Incentives

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Timothy Taylor writes,

If we want people to be serious about recycling, having a policy of 5-10 cents for returning cans and bottles is likely to be a more effective tools than curbside recycling.

He points out that beverage companies are the bootleggers in the bootleggers-and-baptists coalition in favor of curbside recycling, because communities often use curbside recycling does not raise the cost of distributing beverages in bottles. For economics teachers, this is a three-fer: the concept of externality (how large is the externality created by putting bottles into garbage?), the use of prices to incent behavior, and public choice theory.