Archive for August, 2009
Obama Administration Needs Sociologists
| Peter Klein |
And fewer economists, according to the sociologists interviewed by Inside Higher Ed:
Donald Tomaskovic-Devey, a professor of sociology at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, described watching the news in December, as the economy was in a free fall and Barack Obama, as president-elect, was naming people to key positions in his administration. From the social sciences, he said, it was “the same old cast of characters,” and that means economists.
Obama’s election had brought “a sense of possibility,” but “as a sociologist I was pissed off,” he said.
“I have economist envy on a good day and worse things on a bad day,” he said.
I have great respect for my sociologically trained brethren and sistren (cistern?) but am not sure what, exactly, they are asking for. One sociologist thinks economists downplay race and gender — “their supply and demand curves don’t deal with these questions” — which is silly, as much of the analysis of subprimes by labor economists focuses exactly on this. I’m not claiming that sociology (or anthropology or history or psychology) has no useful policy implications, of course, only asking for specifics. (more…)
Four Talks on Keynes
| Peter Klein |
Videos from February’s inaugural event of Duke University’s Center for the History of Political Economy, a series of lectures on Keynes:
- Maynard Keynes of Bloomsbury by Craufurd Goodwin
- Keynes as Policy Advisor by E. Roy Weintraub
- Keynes and Economics by Kevin D. Hoover
- Keynes and Hayek by Bruce Caldwell
The texts are here. Thanks to Ross Emmett for the pointer.
Navigating a Process of Integrating Co-Authors’ Diverse Mental Models
| Russ Coff |
Not long ago, Peter mentioned his heavily downloaded SEJ article (with Nicolai, Yasemin, and Joe). They argue that entrepreneurial teams have a greater potential for competitive advantage than individuals if positive team dynamics allow them to draw upon members’ diverse mental models.
My related working paper unpacks positive team dynamics across the variance generation and selection stages of creativity. In a nutshell, the required group mood differs markedly between the two stages and many teams are unable to navigate the divide.
Ironically, this paper has, itself, been a journey to meld co-authors’ diverse mental models. (more…)
Greif Under Fire Again
| Peter Klein |
We noted previously Jeremy Edwards and Sheilagh Ogilvie’s challenge to Avner Greif, contenting that he misread his primary source material, and Greif’s response. Now Charles Rowley has published a paper in Public Choice accusing Greif of academic dishonesty, namely by failing to cite Janet Landa’s prior work on the economics of identity and trust:
This commentary demonstrates that Avner Greif, through his citation practices, has denied Janet Landa her full intellectual property rights with respect to her contributions to the economic analysis of trust and identity. He has done so by systematically failing to cite her published papers in this field, incidentally promoting his own publications as meriting priority. In consequence, he has effectively blocked out Janet Landa’s work from the mainstream economics literature, albeit not from the literature of law and economics, where his own writings have not been directed.
It’s an odd piece. I’m not sufficiently familiar with Landa’s work to evaluate its place in the history of thought in this area, or to judge whether Greif has appropriated her ideas without attribution. Rowley doesn’t accuse Greif of plagiarism, only of failing to cite an important predecessor and overstating the novelty of his own work. This is a difficult claim to substantiate; obviously the evaluation of prior contributions in one’s own area is highly subjective. And the implication (later in the piece) that Greif’s citation practices contributed to his Genius Award seems like a cheap shot. It is true, however, that contemporary economists tend to be woefully ignorant of the history of economic thought (and, as Rowley implies, that game theorists have what might be called a “healthy sense of self”).
Update: I missed earlier discussions of the Rowley piece at Monkey Cage and Crooked Timber. The Monkey Cage commentary is disappointing, mostly ad hominem snarks at Rowley, the field of public choice, and (most bizarre, but it’s Brad Delong), the Mont Pelerin Society. Henry’s analysis at Crooked Timber is more serious, and I think he gets it right.
Coasean Bargaining Around Wrigley Field
| Peter Klein |
While enjoying the Phillies’ 12-inning victory over the Cubs Tuesday night Joe Mahoney, Jongwook Kim, and I talked about the implications of the Coase Theorem for the Wrigley Rooftops. The rooftop seats are still there — and some are quite fancy — despite many attempts by the Cubs over the years to have them removed, as beneficiaries of an unwarranted positive externality. Apparently a few years back the Cubs sought an injunction against the rooftop owners on grounds of copyright infringement, and most of the owners agreed in an out-of-court settlement to pay royalties to the team in exchange for official endorsement.
One can imagine other ways to internalize the externality — the team could build a wall to obscure the view, buy out the rooftop buildings’ owners, or pay them to take down the seats. There are only a dozen or so buildings, so I don’t imagine that the bargaining costs are very high, suggesting that the current arrangement is the one that maximizes joint surplus, but some of you readers must be much more familiar with the details. What’s going on, from a Coasean perspective? Certainly this is an interesting example for a classroom discussion of property rights and the Coase Theorem. I thought I’d find several online discussions but a quick Google search came up with just one law-review article. It seems that more recently, the club has been going after the rooftop owners not for selling seats, but for using the Cubs logo without permission.
Heterogeneity and Health Care
| Peter Klein |
Further to Russ’s post: One of the most frustrating aspects of the discussion surrounding health-care reform is the tendency of politicians, activists, and even a few economists to talk about “health care” as if it’s a homogeneous blob, or an intangible thing like “love” or “happiness.” Of course, what we produce and consume, what we exchange on markets, is not “health care” but specific, discrete health-care goods and services (procedures, medications, insurance policies, etc.). If you never go to the doctor and consume only one aspirin per year, do you have “health care”? If not, what specific bundle of goods and services constitutes a unit of “health care”?
Once we realize we are really talking about discrete, marginal units of particular goods and services the very notion of “universal access to health care” becomes problematic. What exactly is it that people have a universal right to? It’s analogous to debates about the environment. One can have a sort of philosophical or meta-economic commitment to “the environment,” and its protection (hoo-boy), but this means very little in terms of specific trade-offs at the margin. Is it better to have one more house or airport runway or corn field, or one more patch of meadow or forest? Being an “environmentalist” doesn’t answer that question. You know the old story: everybody values “safety,” but that doesn’t mean you never leave your house or, when you do, drive to work in a Sherman tank. You willingly sacrifice some amount of safety in exchange for units of other scarce and valuable goods (like access to the world outside your house, time spent traveling, money). Each of us evaluates this trade-off differently. Likewise, the marginal valuations of specific health-care goods and services, relative to other consumption and investment goods, cash balances, etc. varies from individual to individual. There’s no such thing as “health care.” As always, heterogeneity matters.
Will Mitchell’s Comments on Receiving the BPS Irwin Award
| Russ Coff |
A big congratulations to Will for winning this prestigious award. It is really something to hear a person’s students describe how their mentor has altered their lives. Many misty eyes in the room…
Embedded in Will’s comments after receiving the award was an observation that in many business settings, such as in developing countries, effective business decisions cannot be made using the risk-based tools (like NPV) that are so often taught in business schools. He argued that, in the face of Knightian uncertainty, these tools fail miserably.
So what would be a set of tools to address uncertainty? The closest that I teach would be scenario analysis and real options. Here, one still needs to estimate parameters like the volatility of the investment or probabilities of outcomes (for decision trees or binomial trees). Of course, the assumption that these parameters could be known still suggests reflect risk rather than uncertainty. However, I emphasize sensitivity analysis (such as simulations, etc.) on these parameters to address the fact that they cannot be known.
First, is this the best set of tools available for Knightian uncertainty?
Second, is Will right that these are left out of most strategy courses? Perhaps we need to re-think the curriculum a bit…
John Hughes
| Peter Klein |
You probably heard that John Hughes, director of the great youth comedies of the 1980s, passed away last week. Perhaps his most lasting achievement was making a star out of Ben Stein. Everyone knows “Bueller? Bueller?” and “Anyone? Anyone?” But do you remember the subject of Stein’s famous lecture?
Naturally, when Hollywood wants to portray the most boring academic subject imaginable, it turns to. . . .
Statistics Is Sexy
| Peter Klein |
So say Hal Varian, Erik Brynjolfsson, and Peter Orszag, among others quoted in this NY Times piece (via Laura M). “I keep saying that the sexy job in the next 10 years will be statisticians,” says Varian, who now toils away as chief economist at Google, though he’s not far from the hearts of most economics PhD students. Here’s Brynjolfsson: “We’re rapidly entering a world where everything can be monitored and measured. But the big problem is going to be the ability of humans to use, analyze, and make sense of the data.”
The article doesn’t actually say much about the substance of the “new” statistics, but the writer has in mind inductive, very-large-N, data-mining exercises (the kind of analysis not taught to social-science and business-administration graduate students, except perhaps some marketing and finance PhDs). Of course we still make our students take multiple semesters of classical statistics and econometrics.
Solution to a Credit Bubble? More Credit
| Peter Klein |
As noted before (1, 2, 3), policymakers (and some economists) seem immune to the argument that the credit bubble may have been caused by, you know, too much credit, and that encouraging people to increase their debt levels even more might not be the optimal policy response.
Bill Shughart, a very good economist, notes some disturbing parallels between the monetary and regulatory policies that led to the housing crisis and the US government’s “cars for clunkers” program. Whatever its effect on improving air quality (marginal) or stimulating aggregate demand (barf), one consequence is that people who would not otherwise have taken out a new car loan will do so, increasing total and average leverage in the economy. Will banks be pressured to extend new-car credit to “subprime” borrowers? Well, if all you care about is total lending, this is a good thing.
Another Nanosecond of Fame
| Dick Langlois |
Warm thanks to Art Diamond for his very nice review on eh.net of my book The Dynamics of Industrial Capitalism: Schumpeter, Chandler and the New Economy. I am most pleased that Art recognizes the book to be primarily theory, albeit with much discussion of economic history and economic ideas.
Better Coauthoring Tools in Office 2010
| Peter Klein |
Despite several highly rewarding coauthoring relationships I do write some papers by myself. One problem with coauthored papers and presentations, as you probably know, is version confusion: Am I editing the latest version? Is one of my coauthors editing the same version at the same time? Did I remember to accept or reject her changes before working on mine? As the number of coauthors increases to three or even four, these coordination problems multiply.
According to WWD the new version of Office includes much better coauthoring tools:
Word 2010, OneNote 2010, and PowerPoint 2010 now include a co-authoring feature, enabling multiple authors to work on the same document at the same time. This is a welcome change from having to use SharePoint, where only one author at a time can check a document out for editing. The addition of co-authoring is really ratcheting Office 2010’s collaboration options.
In related news, the newest version of Skype allows you to share your desktop with a colleague, which might be another good way to make slides for a joint presentation.
Short Piece on Probability Theory
| Peter Klein |
“Risk, Uncertainty, and Economic Organization” is my contribution to the Hoppe Festschrift. I got the topic idea from some blogger guy. My chapter focuses, as the title suggests, on Knightian uncertainty. Hoppe places Knight, along with Ludwig von Mises, squarely in the frequentist camp (typically associated with Ludwig’s brother Richard). I tend to agree with Hoppe although, as I discuss in the paper, there are many interpretations of Knight, and some commentators argue that subjective (Bayesian) probability theory renders untenable the Knightian distinction between insurable risk and true uncertainty (see, for example, Dick’s 1982 paper).
Ultimately, however, I don’t think the approach to the firm promoted on this blog depends on a particular interpretation of Knight. The central claim is that judgment represents a kind of decision-making that cannot be traded on the market, and that therefore requires the entrepreneur exercising such judgment to establish a firm (more specifically, to take ownership of capital resources). To put it differently, ownership of assets implies a kind of ultimate responsibility that the owner cannot delegate. I think one can be agnostic about exactly why judgment isn’t tradable — it could be a form of asymmetric information, rather than ontological differences between types of knowledge — and still buy the basic Knight-Mises-Foss-Klein approach to the firm.
The History of England and the Future of the Archive
| Dick Langlois |
I just received a newsletter from our Humanities Institute announcing (among other things) a graduate student conference at Yale in February on “The Past’s Digital Presence: Database, Archive, and Knowledge Work in the Humanities.” Here are some of the suggested possible topics:
- The Future of the History of the Book
- Public Humanities
- Determining Irrelevance in the Archive
- Defining the Key-Word
- The Material Object in Archival Research
- Local Knowledge, Global Access
- Digital Afterlives
- Foucault, Derrida, and the Archive
- Database Access Across the Profession
- Mapping and Map-Based Platforms
- Interactive Research
I draw your attention to the fourth from the bottom. It reminds my childhood, which I spent in Catholic schools through twelfth grade: no matter how secular the topic, there had to be at least a perfunctory mention of religion. (We were even encouraged to inscribe JMJ, for Jesus, Mary, and Joseph, at the top of our papers, though as I recall only the girls actually did this.) In the humanities, there has to be some obeisance to Postmodernism, however irrelevant to the topic.
The newsletter also mentioned, and rightly praised, a fascinating article in the Harvard alumni magazine called “Who Killed the Men of England?” My Scandinavian colleagues may want to take particular note.
Jack of All Trades and Master of . . . Administration?
| Nicolai Foss |
CEOs, leaders, and entrepreneurs are typically seen as generalists (e.g., here). They are confronted with the broadest decision domains and have the responsibility of making sometimes crucial decisions within those domains.
In “Congratulations or Condolences? The Role of Human Capital in the Cultivation of a University Administrator” (here; scroll down), John McDowell, Larry Singell, and Mark Stater argue that this also holds for universities. They develop and test a probit model of the decision between administration (from dept. head all the way to university pres.) and the pure academic career. The model is conditioned by training, career background, and (juicy!) academic performance. The data are drawn from the American Economic Association directories. Among the findings: economists with doctoral degrees from less prestigious universities are more likely to select into admin. Women and foreigners are less likely to become administrators. The experience level also positively influences the probability of getting into admin.
I am not convinced that the authors truly capture the specialized versus general human capital dimension. Some of their measures (e.g., whether the PhD degree was awarded by a top-35 PhD institution or not) are measures of quality rather than of the degree of specialization (in fact, this may be consistent with the view that many “pure” academics hold of admins!). Nevertheless, definitely worth a read and good ammo for harassing your local dean! (more…)
HR Graphic of the Week
| Peter Klein |
From Wired’s “New Rules for Highly Evolved Humans” feature: “Use a Plausible Excuse When You Call In Sick.”
“Unskilled and Unaware of It”
| Nicolai Foss |
In general I enjoy teaching and interacting with students. But some students can be a pain, particularly those who are too intellectually challenged to realize the nature of their predicament. They don’t accept (their low) grades (particularly not the grade of “i” ;-)), and blame the professor/instructor for their own low achievement. Here is why.
A Dark Summer Reflection
| Lasse Lien |
Words like science, scientific, university, professor, etc. still command considerable respect in society. Why? I would suggest that the brand equity of “scientific” (and associated concepts) is almost entirely created by the great advances and visible impact of fields such as physics, engineering, chemistry, medicine, mathematics, and other natural sciences. The massive advantages and explanatory power these fields have provided to society have created a status that the social sciences benefit from, but offer (relatively) modest contributions to. If I were in, say, physics or medicine, I think I would be particularly provoked by those strands of the social sciences that seem to want all the benefits of the “brand,” but also insist on the freedom to break all the rules that created it. I would presumably cry out that if you don’t like our brand, build your own, don’t destroy ours. But then again, I might just have a bad case of physics envy.
The New Issue of JEM
| Nicolai Foss |
No doubt a sure sign of impending senility, I take a huge interest in economic methodology, that is, meta-theory as it applies to economics. I serve on the editorial board of the Journal of Economic Methodology and usually enjoy reading the journal. The latest issue of JEM features at least two papers that should be of direct interest to O&M readers, namely Alain Marciano’s “Buchanan’s catallactic critique of Robbins’ definition of economics” (basically a discussion of Buchanan’s famous 1964 presidential address to the Southern Economic Association), and Oliver Williamson’s “Pragmatic methodology: a sketch with applications to transaction cost economics” (pragmatic methodology meaning “keep it simple,” “get it right,” “make it plausible,” and “engage in predictions and empirical testing”). Ah, and for those who take delight in economic controversy there is a rather thorough smashing by Ken Binmore of a recent Deirdre McCloskey book.
What Are the Bounds on the Right to Healthcare?
| Russ Coff |
My last blog dealt with the efforts to reform U.S. healthcare to reduce costs. Now I turn to the other key objective of achieving universal coverage. This seems at odds with lowering costs since covering 46 million uninsured people would not come cheap.
As Karl points out in his comment to my earlier post, many believe that healthcare is a right. Certainly there is an ethical and moral obligation to help those who are ill: it is part of the oath to which all physicians pledge as well as the UN charter.
But how far does this right extend? What level of healthcare is a human right and what level becomes a luxury? This is a very practical question. Currently there is a proposal for a luxury tax on insurance plans that offer too much coverage (Listen on NPR). Clearly some believe it is no longer a human right at that level. . . .
But let’s unpack the 46 million uninsured. (more…)
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