New School Economic Review

WIRED mag is too noisy

by Benjamin on January 15, 2011

Work’s been atrocious so far in 2011, and so I find myself reading magazines in trains and other means of transport, and I fear a rant is coming:

I picked up my first copy of Wired Magazine (UK) which had a very cool front-page with UV colors, and I figured it would be a good read. Dear lord, they have a graphics designer who I feel a deep sympathy for, because over the first 76 pages there were 43 pages without any article content. That is 43 PAGES OF ONLY ADVERTS. Full page adverts. Anyone who knows anything about Edward Tufte’s idea that noise-to-signal ratios can be applied to visual presentations will tell you that more noise than signal is just bad design. Most other readers will just annoyed… Painfully so.

The first 6 full pages were all adverts, and then the letters page even included a complaint from a frustrated reader who complained there were 7 full-page adverts at the start of the last issue. I guess they had listened – partly. The real tragedy is that the second half of the magazine, the last 76 pages, has some really interesting articles and only ten pages are advertisement. Frankly it doesn’t really matter, as I was too annoyed with the magazine by then, and retreated back to my issue of the Economist.

Which, in case you are wondering, was 76 pages long, with 7 pages of adverts and 3 pages of job adverts (in the first 2011 issue). Wired should learn from this and cut down on their number of adverts and perhaps position them at dividing points in the magazine. Sorry about the rant, but perhaps this will save someone a bit of frustration. Maybe.

Hello 2010, goodbye Prof. Samuelson

by Benjamin on January 1, 2010

2010 has just about started across the world. It is 3.30pm in Delhi where I am typing, but it’s only 10pm in 2009 if you are on American Samoa (GMT -12). It is perhaps appropriate that we remember back and look forward at the same time. In the flat I am visiting in Delhi is an old issue of the Economist, which asks – “Where did our 3 Trillion dollars go?”. A special report on the banking systems failure and bail-out from the year that went. Nostalgic. The article suggests that banks will have to renew their social contract and re-think their structure. As we have seen in the last few months, relatively little reflection and none of this has come to fruition. As someone once quipped; “History has only taught us one thing: That no-one learns from History” – Amen.

2009 was also the year when a political scientist got the Nobel remembrance prize. The best quality work in economics again comes from non-economists, and in a crisis it is given to someone outside the ‘mainstream’. When Kahneman got the prize it was for an equally excellent body of work, which was read by more than just economists. When Merton and Scholes got it in 1997, they ruined the financial system. By 2001 the lesson was forgotten, I hope 2010 is not the year when the 2008-09 crisis is forgotten too, but lets see if Fama doesn’t get it next year. Then we’ll know.

Finally 2009 was the year we lost Professor Samuelson. A man who epitomized economics in the 20th century, not always for his theoretical ideas, nor for his (plaudable) approach to mathematics, but for introducing the textbook. Economics post-Samuelson became dominated by textbook instruction which for better or worse has spread economics much beyond a few specialised departments. Whether it needs re-thinking is a question posed in the latest International Review of Economics Education, but for now, lets look forward while remembering the past. In his excellent obituary in The Mint (India’s Wall Street Journal Partner), a fellow New Schooler has provided a good start to to doing just that, by remembering Prof. Samuelson. Happy New Year

Scholars avoiding the policy world?

by Benjamin on April 25, 2009

It seems that fewer and fewer top people within academia on the international relations side of things want to go into policy making. The Washington Post (via Chris Blattman) article is an interesting read, but one paragraph in particular disturbed me:

Scholars are paying less attention to questions about how their work relates to the policy world, and in many departments a focus on policy can hurt one’s career. Advancement comes faster for those who develop mathematical models, new methodologies or theories expressed in jargon that is unintelligible to policymakers.

This sounds very much like a lot of the criticisms thrown at modern economics, and some have argued that the mathematization of the other social sciences is partly to blame on ‘economic imperialism’. It is  our methods (preferably the out-dated or standard ones) which are absorbed by other social sciences who also want to be seen as more ‘scientific’ and thus feel they should be more mathematical. A very extreme belief  is on display in Stanford’s Edward P. Lazear 1999 paper. This phenomena is often referred to as ‘physics envy’ after the very similar psychological ideas of Mr. Freud, and is  re-capped well by Physicist (turned economist at Columbia) Emmanuel Derman in two pages, and it boils down to the fact that the moral philosophy of the 17th and 18th century, the political economy of the 19th and early 20th holds not a candle to the magnificent mathematical beauty of modern micro. Maths may be all good and well, but to me, the fact that micro and macro cannot be unified in maths (at least not yet, as macro has become micro) and that when the macroeconomists are needed, as and when a crisis rolls along, we throw the maths to the curb for some empirical models and some macroeconomic linkages.

As other disciplines adopt our maths, I can’t help but feel that we as a discipline have taken some of the scientific rigour out of the political scientists, international relations scholars and anthropologists who followed in our optimistic micro footsteps. McCloskey always reminds us, that “science” means a systematic enquiry about a given phenomenon. It is the systematic enquiry, be it through text, data, books, experience, experiment and even mathematics, which makes a science scientific – not its mathematical aspect. Now our obsession is  keeping others away from the policy making world – much like many economists try to avoid large aspects of the real world – by moving our set of (skewed) academic values into their fields. Political Science rebelled against this move some years ago, but it doesn’t seem to have been enough.