Thursday, April 05, 2007

Econlinks for 05-04-'07

  • Greg Mankiw, the most popular Econ teacher in Harvard, having fun on April Fool's Day. A classic one . No wonder he is so popular :-). In any case, part of the secret is: give some attention to your students!
  • One older excellent article on entrepreneurship by the most recent Economics Nobel Laureate, Edmund Phelps, in the WSJ Editorial Page. It is entitled "Dynamic Capitalism" and was published on October 10th, last year. Reminds me of a great quote from another Nobel Laureate, in Literature this time (known even better as a statesman, of course), Winston Churchill: "Some regard private enterprise as if it were a predatory tiger to be shot. Others look at it as a cow that they can milk. Only a handful see it for what it really is - the strong horse that pulls the whole cart". Amen!
  • Is Freakonomics ruining Economics? An interesting discussion of Alex Tabarrok and Tyler Cowen on MR. I tend to agree with the "Levitt and Heckman" rather than "Levitt vs. Heckman" part but only as long as the freakonomics is simply not wrong (chances are- and the temptation is high- that one extrapolates those results and most often that is not possible) and does not claim to be anything else than... freakonomics. As I mentioned previously on my blog, Heckman, Rubinstein or Rust certainly have different opinions than the guys from George Mason University and much more extreme than mine :-).

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