andrew_gelman_stats andrew_gelman_stats-2010 andrew_gelman_stats-2010-60 knowledge-graph by maker-knowledge-mining
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Introduction: Mark Palko writes : We’ll define freshwater economics as the theory that economic behavior (and perhaps most non-economic behavior) can be explained using the concepts of rational actors and efficient markets and auteur theory as the idea that most films (particularly great films) represent the artistic vision of a single author (almost always the director) and the best way to approach one of those films is through the body of work of its author. Both of these definitions are oversimplified and a bit unfair but they will get the discussion started. . . . Compared to their nearest neighbors, film criticism and economics (particularly macroeconomics) are both difficult, messy fields. Films are collaborative efforts where individual contributions defy attribution and creative decisions often can’t be distinguished from accidents of filming. Worse yet, most films are the product of large corporations which means that dozens of VPs and executives might have played a role (sometimes
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1 Both of these definitions are oversimplified and a bit unfair but they will get the discussion started. [sent-2, score-0.068]
2 Compared to their nearest neighbors, film criticism and economics (particularly macroeconomics) are both difficult, messy fields. [sent-6, score-0.473]
3 Films are collaborative efforts where individual contributions defy attribution and creative decisions often can’t be distinguished from accidents of filming. [sent-7, score-0.197]
4 Worse yet, most films are the product of large corporations which means that dozens of VPs and executives might have played a role (sometimes an appallingly large one) in determining what got to the screen. [sent-8, score-0.386]
5 Unlike researchers in the hard sciences, they have to deal with messiness of human behavior. [sent-10, score-0.074]
6 Unlike psychologists, microeconomists have few opportunities to perform randomized trials and macroeconomists have none whatsoever. [sent-11, score-0.221]
7 Finally, unlike any other researchers in any other field, economists face a massive problem with deliberate feedback. [sent-12, score-0.418]
8 Faced with all this confusion, film scholars and economists (at least, macroeconomists) both reached the same inevitable conclusion: they would have to rely on broader, stronger assumptions than those colleagues in adjacent fields were using. [sent-16, score-0.676]
9 This does not apply simply to auteurists and freshwater economists. [sent-17, score-0.432]
10 Anyone who does any work in these fields will have to start with some sweeping and unprovable statements about how the world works. [sent-18, score-0.143]
11 Auteurists and freshwater economists just took this idea to its logical conclusion and built their work on the simplest and most elegant assumptions possible . [sent-19, score-0.692]
12 Given that we have two similar responses to two similar situations, it is not all that surprising to see that both schools of thought have followed similar paths and have come to dominate their respective fields. [sent-22, score-0.311]
13 I don’t think that anyone would argue that any institution has had more impact on economics than the Chicago school over the past fifty years and I doubt you could find a theory of film that comes close to the impact of auteurism over the same period. [sent-23, score-0.926]
14 The dominance of auteurism and the Chicago School is, if anything, greater when you venture outside of academia. [sent-27, score-0.388]
15 The problem with auteurism is compounded by the fact that most reviewers have no idea what a director actually does. [sent-29, score-0.739]
16 This was certainly not true of the original French critics who popularized the theory (who were, themselves, directors) or of its primary American proponent, Andrew Sarris, (who went to great pains to discuss exactly and also set out the definitive list of the conditions I referred to). [sent-30, score-0.321]
17 Today most reviews will use the possessive form of the director’s name then proceed to discuss everything about the film but the direction. [sent-31, score-0.316]
18 The strange result of all this is that directors are both the most overrated and under-appreciated of movie makers. [sent-32, score-0.305]
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Introduction: Jeff points me to this and this . There seems to be a perception that “economists, the people who will cooly explain why people will be completely corrupt if the marginal benefit exceeds the marginal cost, see themselves as being completely not corrupt” (according to Atrios) and that “the economists who have decided to lend their names to the [Romney] campaign have been caught up in this culture of fraud” (according to Krugman). The bloggers above are talking about macro, and perhaps they’re right that macroeconomists see themselves as uncorruptible and above it all. As with political science, the key parts of macroeconomics are about what is good for the world (or, at least, what is good for the country), and it’s hard to do this well from a level of complete cynicism. I’m no expert on macroeconomics, but my general impression is that, Marxists aside, macroeconomists tend to assume shared goals. Micro, though, that’s completely different. These dudes are happy to admit to t
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Introduction: Joseph Delaney writes : Is it fair to quote the definition of economics from the blurb for a book? If so, consider this definition in the blurb for Emily Oster’s new book: When Oster was expecting her first child, she felt powerless to make the right decisions for her pregnancy. How doctors think and what patients need are two very different things. So Oster drew on her own experience and went in search of the real facts about pregnancy using an economist’s tools. Economics is not just a study of finance. It’s the science of determining value and making informed decisions. To make a good decision, you need to understand the information available to you and to know what it means to you as an individual. So, when applied to a medical topic (like pregnancy) how does this differ from evidence based medicine? Should I be calling myself an economist? None of this mean that Emily shouldn’t write this book. My own read on the alcohol and pregnancy angle is that the current advic
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