Thursday, May 24, 2012

but enough about you...

....let's talk about me!

Over at MR, folks are peppering LeBron with requests for posts.

One request that really struck me was, "What’s the most important economics question you ever asked?"

At a facile level, it's, "why are some nations so rich and others so poor?", but I can't claim any originality there as it was asked many, many times before I got there. I'm guessing the commenter meant an original question.

The next contender would be, "why do macroeconomists ignore politics?". Here I was a little less un-original, but several others were before me.

I guess the closest thing to an original economics question I've asked is, "if we want to study growth, why are we throwing away information by using cross-sectional averages instead of panels?"

p.s. if you have requests for posts from Mungo or me, please put them in the comments and we'll see what we can do. At least here, your odds of getting chosen are much much higher!


7 comments:

Samuel Wilson said...

What should economists be doing better to illuminate irrationality? Lab experiments seem to catalog instances of mistaken or biased beliefs, but it seems to me that not enough effort is spent identifying the genesis of stupidity. Is this even a task for economics?

Unknown said...

What is the most common misunderstanding that educated people have about economics (say they studied the subject a year of high school and a year of college and then read Freakonomics)?

What era was the high watermark for U.S. economic policy?

Are there any Asian universities with strong economics departments?

Will American universities ever cease to charge students tens of thousands of dollars per year on education? Are these high tuition fees justified?

Is free trade always the right answer?

What do you think of the economic policy of my employer, the Taiwanese government?

Anonymous said...

If you were the Supreme Ruler of the USA, what would be the top 5 things you would do?

Gerardo said...

If you hadn't made the jump to digital music beyond CDs, how would you go about doing it? Also, is Spotify worth it?

Damian said...

I'd like to know more about your research process - how does it work? If something intrigues you, do you make a note of it and investigate? Do you seek out data as a first part of your investigation? How much does the current literature matter?

I'd like to see more on public transportation too - I liked the podcast on Chile and their bus system. ANy hope that shared ride/carpooling makes a comeback with smartphones?

Anonymous said...

What's up with the frequency of tenure denials at top political science departments? And what's tenure denial rates like in economics?

Anonymous said...

Without proposing politically impossible changes, what are the three changes or reforms that would make health care in the US more efficient and effective?