Best of #econtwitter - Week of December 24, 2023: interesting tweets
Welcome readers old and new to this week’s edition of Best of Econtwitter. Please submit suggestions — very much including your own work! — over email or on Twitter @just_economics.
Misc
^more people should do this, and be brave enough to share
^provoked a lot of discussion (e.g. here, here)
^unironically, JEP/handbooks are underrated
Robert Solow, RIP
My three favorite Solow quotes:
1)
2) and one from an interview that has stuck with me:
3) and one featured in an old Krugman blog post criticizing endogenous growth theory (“The New Growth Fizzle”):
^a relevant quote from Tyler Cowen’s new “GOAT” book (on ‘who is the greatest economist of all time’) that I think is worth chewing on:
^it’s a good intro summary
^what
Charts
^top percentile of good discussions, up and down the thread; some dispute over these numbers
Public goods
Disinflation
^…there’s a lot of discussion in the replies. File under: even the most brilliant macroeconomists can still wildly disagree
Peeking ahead one week, but
^in the replies, again, a lot of debate
And there’s still more: Krugman/Dube, Kopczuk, Yglesias, Weisenthal, a meta takeaway on all of this is that *we need precise/quantifiable predictions* that can be falsified, instead of fighting over “what did we mean by transitory”
Opportunity Insights
There was a bad hit piece on OI
(“It's bad on purpose to make you click”)
^really, really important to emphasize the difference between theory vs. applied work here (IME personally at least)