This post is a continuation of my post from yesterday, available here. I’ve been predicting the death of the classroom for three years, and wishing for it for far longer. We have classrooms, and continue to have classrooms, for the same reasons that factories organized themselves around the steam engine: it was the best response … Continue reading “The Death of the Classroom, *NOT* the University”
Part 1 is here, and Part 2 is here. And here’s a brief recap of the story so far. Part 1 covers what industrial policy is, and why it is important. Part 2 helps us understand that India’s industrial policy, at least in terms of outcomes, has not produced great results. Now let’s answer the … Continue reading “All About Industrial Policy, Part 3”
If you’ve taken a course in behavioral economics, the phrase “the 401(k) study” is all you need to know what I am talking about. But not everyone has taken a course in behavioral economics, so here’s ChatGPT with an explainer: In Thaler and Benartzi’s work on retirement savings, they explore how simplifying the number of … Continue reading “Satte pe Satta”
Three sleepless nights. That’s how long it will take, Ethan Mollick says, for you to get used to the idea that we are now in the age of AI. And like it or not, we are in the age of AI. It’s here, and as he says later on in the book, it is only … Continue reading “Co-Intelligence: A Review”
Friday’s post taught us that trade is a good thing, and that more trade makes us better off. The magical part is that it makes both parties better off: This is what economists mean when they say that trade is a non-zero sum game. Trade leaves both parties better off. Both parties in this “game” … Continue reading “So No One Loses When It Comes to Trade, Right?…*Right?!*”
Let’s say you are a student of economics, and have got placed with a mid-tier firm, and with a ho-hum salary to boot. Not what you were expecting at the start of placement season, and not as plum a placement as some of your peers. Worse, the rules about placement mean that you can’t sit … Continue reading “All for One, and None for All”
This will become clear when you circle back here after having read the whole thing, but opportunity costs really are everywhere. In Zen And The Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, Robert Pirsig talks about an analytical knife. A very deadly knife, he calls it, “so swift and sharp you sometimes don’t see it moving”. And today’s … Continue reading “Me? I’m the definition of Baloo”
Robin Hanson wrote a blogpost the other day about a book called Fossil Future. I haven’t read the book, and given my infinitely long to-read list, I don’t think I’ll get around to it anytime soon. But the blogpost is worth a read, and for many more reasons than just learning more about the book … Continue reading “Economics in One Sentence”
Irwin Collier’s excellent, excellent blog had a post recently that I wish I could assign as homework to everybody studying economics today (myself included). The post is about the semester end examination for a course called “Methods of Economic Investigation”. Said exmaination for said course took place exactly one hundred and twenty years ago (yup, … Continue reading “My kind of exam”
The decor represented a study in contradictions: the pig fetus floated a few feet away from the Buddhist shrine; the Denver skyline faced a People’s Liberation Army tank. There were two bottles of Johnnie Walker, along with the two Ming-dynasty signal cannons that Wei Ziqi had foraged from the Great Wall. A calendar was dedicated … Continue reading “Country Driving, by Peter Hessler: A Review”
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