Got my dissertation proposal approved.
First paragraph: This dissertation continues the tradition of identifying the unintended consequences of the US health insurance system. Its main contribution is to estimate the size of the distortions caused by the employer-based system and regulations intended to fix it, while using methods that are more novel and appropriate than those of previous work.
The most relevant field here is International Monetary Economics.
After TAing a class on the subject, I became convinced that most people (including economists) would be better off ignoring money most of the time, and just following where the goods went. So think of this as a transfer of $1000 worth of goods from the US to Kenya.
You could get the official answer with an IS-LM-BP model and some masochism.
More seriously, this does make me want to look into theoretical work on the macroeconomics of charity. On the empirical side, the best evidence is that even...
While I agree with almost all of the antifaq (the general point is apparently more plausible to economists than non-economists), this is pretty misleading:
"The future cannot be a cause of the past."
True, but human expectations about the future can be very important in the present. If you expect that 5 years from now FAI will take over, you won't bother to make many long-term investments like building factories and training new workers.
"Shorter work weeks didn't just happen. It took a huge amount of effort from unions, which were a lot more powerful then than they are now." I've never understood why people find this story compelling, precisely because of your final clause. If unions were the main force determining hours, why have hours continued to go down now that unions have been drastically weakened?
"Groups of workers with higher status get paid better." True. But what is the main direction of causation here?
According to basic economics, workers will get paid their marginal product (how much you add to production). This is a pretty good first approximation. Of course, you can get paid in many ways- money, flexible hours, even status. The higher the status of a job the less it needs to pay to attract workers; this is called a compensating differential. High-level politicians are very high-status but don't make that much. Conversely, very low-status jobs (like janitor or garbageman) have to pay a bit more in money wages to get people to work.
"a normal effect of recessions is for productivity to increase; businesses lay off workers and then try to figure out how to run their operation more efficiently with less workers, that happens in every recession"
This is not true. In fact, the normal effect is the opposite- a productivity decrease. See the data for the US after 1948 here.
If you are looking for a story as to why, in some business cycle theories (such as Real Business Cycle Theory) the recession is caused by a negative shock to productivity.
"Instead of trying to get a PhD and a job in academia (which is very costly and due to "publish or perish" forces you to work on topics that are currently popular in academia), get a job that leaves you with a lot of free time" Part of the attraction of academia to me is that it is exactly the job that leaves you with lots of free time. A professor only has to be in a certain place at a certain time 3-12 hours per week (depending on teaching load), 30 weeks per year. After tenure, you can research whatever you want, especially if you aren't in a lab-science field that leaves you dependent on grants. Even before tenure I can work on neglected problems, so long as they aren't neglected due to their low prestige.
"don't do a PhD in a country without a universal healthcare system" Funded PhD's in the US commonly include health insurance coverage as part of your stipend.
This is yet more support for your main point: the fact that getting a PhD in some programs/fields is a bad idea does not mean you should avoid a PhD from any program/field.
Philosopher Michael Huemer has a page "Should I go to graduate school in philosophy?" It begins:
...Many philosophy students decide to attend graduate school, knowing almost nothing about the consequences of this decision, or about what the philosophy profession is actually like. By the time they find out, they have already committed several years of their life, and possibly thousands of dollars, to the undertaking. They then learn that their initial assumptions about the field were unrealistically optimistic. They continue in their chosen path, ev
From the same page, "Instrumental variables are rarely used and have generally become viewed with suspicion; their heyday was the 1980s" This is simply not true, at least within economics. Look at any recent econometrics textbook, or search for "instrumental variables" in EconLit and notice how there are more hits every year between 1970 and now.
More simply, you could just ask economists directly. But then they might tell you that the US President has very little impact on the economy.
The linked IGM poll is great though, it can also give you a good feel for which policies economists agree about, and their comments and links can give you some idea of their reasoning.
Relevant paper: Gelman, Silver and Edlin estimated that the average American voter has a 1 in 60 million chance of deciding the election.
"There are all sorts of benevolent aspects of everyday life which are clearly the product of chemistry or engineering or medical science, but it's hard to assemble a collection of concrete, object-level stuff and say "all these things were made by economists!"'
There is a book, "Better Living Through Economics", (the title inspired, I assume, by "Better Living Through Chemistry") that explains some of this. It is largely stories about economists getting the government to work better- ending the draft, stabilizing prices, et cetera.
I study/teach economics for a living, this made my try to think about why it is useful (besides that it gives me a job).
How To Run A Government
Economics has a lot to say about which government policies will make people better off or worse off. This is a big reason I got interested in economics, but its not very practical for the vast majority of people, who have essentially no influence over government policy (and in fact it is economists who are famous for arguing, perhaps incorrectly, that votes don't matter).
Understand How The World Works
It's always nic...
Without addressing the substance of the papers, I can say that in practice most health economists still think the RAND experiment is really important. Robin Hanson is not unusual in this regard, the RAND experiment was featured prominently in the 2 graduate health econ classes I have taken, and in recent textbooks and papers.
As an economics graduate student trying to decide between academia, think tanks, government, and the private sector, I would appreciate it if you could expand on this. In particular, I wonder which jobs have the most novelty (not always teaching the same class or working with the same data), which encourage you to do more/better work, and which have the highest quality colleagues (rated on intelligence or friendliness).
Academics may be relevant as a similar "thinking community". I've heard many academics say they are severe procrastinators. Possible reasons for this are: 1) Procrastinators are attracted to the job, its independence and long-term deadlines 2) The nature of the work makes people procrastinate; research is hard, plus no boss and long-term deadlines mean immediate punishment for procrastination is rare 3) The job makes people feel they have akrasia even when they don't, perhaps because colleagues and competitors seem smarter and harder-working than in other fields
If nothing else, reading LW makes me feel 3)
"Sherlock Holmes once said that once you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the answer. I, however, do not like to eliminate the impossible. The impossible often has a kind of integrity to it that the merely improbable lacks." -- Douglas Adams's Dirk Gently, Holistic Detective
"There are numerous law of economics which appear to fall into this category; however, so far as I can tell, few of them have been mathematically formalized."
For better or worse, just about everything in economics has been mathematically formalized. If you are wondering about a specific "law" or concept I can try to dig up examples.
The independence of irrelevant alternatives ("pairwise independence") can also apply to individuals, it is just that Arrow's theorem doesn't directly require it. However, a better statement of the independence of irrelevant alternatives for Arrow is "if all individuals have preferences satisfying pairwise independence, then the group's decision function should also satisfy it". So for group IIA to matter we should have individual IIA
Its not showing on desktop now either