Paul Romer

Below, my reactions to comments on my post Solow’s Choice: 1.

Several economists, including Brad DeLong and Paul Krugman, have commented on how macroeconomics developed in the late 1970s.

Warning: What follows is inside baseball, and oldster inside baseball at that.

Paul Krugman and I agree that something went very wrong in macroeconomics.

In a previous post, I referred to Feynman Integrity as one possible guide to a life in science.

In a previous post, I said that my claim about mathiness could be reduced to two assertions: Economist N did X.

You can boil my claim about mathiness down to two assertions: Economist ||N|| did ||X||.

Suppose I have an IoT device, controlled by firm A, that buys a bunch of services from firm B.

The usual narrative suggests that the new mathematical tools of modern finance were like the wings that Daedalus gave Icarus.

Anybody interested in the future of mathematical theory in economics should read Cesar Hidalgo’s book Why Information Grows.

If we broaden the frame from mathiness narrowly defined and look for academics who are guided by the norms of politics instead of the norms of science, it is not hard to find examples from both ends of the political spectrum.

It might be helpful to pull back from some of the specifics in the instances of mathiness that I’ve cited in recent posts and recap the background motivation, which springs from concern about the interaction between science and politics.

Dietz Vollrath has a new post that goes a long way toward clarifying the battle lines in the fight over the foundations of growth theory.

1.

The U.S.

Lucas (2009) makes a misleading claim about models of growth: S1: {adding books} => {no change in growth} David Andolfatto admits that S1 is false and the true statement is {adding books} => {{no change in growth} or {sustained change in growth}}.

The key to understanding mathiness is to recognize how a formal language can interact with natural language.

After more than 100 years of incremental change, urban transportation is on the verge of a revolution.

Dietz Vollrath has a new post that continues the discussion about how economists use math.

When I started this discussion about mathiness, I promised myself that I would publicly admit to any mistakes that I make.

I have a rule about assigning blame: When a reader misunderstands, it is the writer’s fault.

I don’t think it takes much philosophical sophistication to understand the challenge we face in defending the norms of science against infection by the norms of politics.

You might think that my undergraduate degree is the kind of thing I’d remember.

In a recent post, Simon Wren-Lewis suggests: i) that there is something wrong in economics, and ii) that the problem lies at a level that is deeper than individual models that are wrong.

In his comment on my Mathiness paper, Noah Smith asks for more evidence that the theory in the McGrattan-Prescott paper that I cite is any worse than the theory I compare it to by Robert Solow and Gary Becker.

In my Mathiness article, I refer to this quote from Lucas (2009): Some knowledge can be ‘embodied’ in books, blueprints, machines and other kinds of physical capital, and we know how to introduce capital into a growth model, but we also know that doing so…

I have a new paper in the Papers and Proceedings Volume of the AER that is out in print and on the AER website.

The data presented here convinces me that policy-induced changes in the urban share of the population could have big effects on GDP per capita and could operate on a scale that affects the quality of life for billions of people.

My daughter, who is a pediatrician in California, sends the discouraging news that it is the best-educated parents who are leading the movement against vaccines.

When I was in Hong Kong in March, I had an interesting interview with Cloud Yip from iMoney magazine.

The New York Times has a good story out today on Upshot concerned with “missing black men.”

3/21/2014 On March 21, 2014 Richard Florida, Paul Romer, and Robert Sampson discussed the Challenge of the City.

6/17/14 The Marron Institute of Urban Management, in partnership with the Urbanization Project, recently hosted a discussion between Paul Romer and Edward Glaeser on the causes and consequences of rapid urbanization.

HOW TO HAVE LESS CRIME AND LESS PUNISHMENT October 9, 2014 5:00 pm - 6:30 pm Kaufan Management Center Cantor Boardroom (11th Floor) 44 W. 4th St.

The homicide rate in the United States is now back down to levels that prevailed in the 1950s.

Brandon Fuller Paul Romer Abstract The developing world already packs 2.6 billion people into its relatively dense cities.

Throughout the developing world, public agencies often act like illegal squatters.

William Bratton Bratton Group LLC Paul Romer NYU Stern Urbanization Project Cantor Boardroom, 11th Floor Kaufman Management Center 44 West Fourth Street New York, NY 10012 Wednesday, Oct 2nd, 2013 4:30-6PM Join the NYU Stern Urbanization Project for a Con…

Led by Paul Romer, the Charter Cities initiative focuses on the potential for startup cities to fast track reform.

The NYU Stern Urbanization Project harnesses the growth of cities to speed up global progress.

One of the newsletters I follow on China is Dragonomics, from GK Research.

The population of the city of Detroit has fallen from 1.8 million in 1950 to about 714,000 in 2010.

For several years, I’ve been collecting examples that illustrate a general principle about incentives and the dynamics of policy: To create the incentives for better outcomes, rely on small stakes because they support good measurement.

In a recent article on urbanization in China The New York Times presented this graph of the urban population share versus GDP per capita in a selected set of countries: The NYTimes article seemed to suggest that China is trying to achieve an urban populat…

The front-page story on urbanization in China that The New York Times published on Sunday June 16 shows how the same facts and quotes can suggest different narratives.

New communities add variance to the outcomes from social interaction.

Former Toronto Mayor David Miller, currently the Future of Cities Global Fellow at NYU Poly, spoke about Urbanization with Paul on March 7, 2013.

Treating the city as a distinct unit of analysis inevitably raises questions about how the city is similar to — and different from — the business.

Much of what we do in a university is organized around units of analysis.

Former Bogotá Mayor Enrique Peñalosa spoke about Urbanization with Paul on February 12, 2013.