Best of #econtwitter - Week of January 15, 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.
Massive negative TFP shock for newsletter writing this week, thanks to the shutdown that Joshua Gans describes here:
Twitter shutting off its API to other apps without warning is unconscionable. Having never used the main Twitter app, it is impossible to replicate my use-flow that I had in Tweetbots. I now get why some people didn’t think moving to Mastodon was a problem.
As always, submissions welcome, if things are missing from the newsletter. Still a lot of juicy content below, though!
First-year macro
I just heard that 1st year PhD students in Econ at MIT no longer need to take a full year of macro. This should be a wakeup call for macro, lest this turn into a new trend. Some (perhaps controversial) thoughts. 1/
^prompted lots of discussion. Specifically: “you can skip 2 of the 14 ‘core’ courses. Doesn’t have to be macro” (more)
I think this is actually an amazing feature of economics, and should continue. There are huge returns to the cohesive disciplinary identity that this fosters.
Peter Hull @instrumenthull
^correlationally, it’s interesting that more unified fields seem more successful (e.g. econ vs. psychology). Of course causality also goes the other direction, but
One thing that I notice amongst my non-macro colleagues (and sometime even the macro ones 😱) is how ingrained partial equilibrium reasoning is. Just things like Ricardian equivalence etc is not well understood, or doesn’t come naturally https://t.co/SOd1fVccC3
Jon Steinsson @JonSteinsson
People are talking about dropping macro classes.
But this week's big policy discussion involved simple extrapolation of micro empirical estimates to aggregate quantities.
@JonSteinsson Tbh Jon, almost all of those arguments could be made for having compulsory echist in the first year, too…
^also, in particular, how about IO methods?
@JonSteinsson Great thread, thank you! A few thoughts. I think the structure of 1st year syllabi in many schools still reflect a time when students started grad school with less tools than now. The focus was on techniques. 1/n
. @tylercowen is in the pro macro in first year camp but advises: “That all said, I would make macro sequences “more practical,” more about economic growth, more about economic history, and less about dynamic programming than is often currently the case.”
Marginal Revolution @MargRev
Very thoughtful thread. My controversial opinion:
a) I eventually came to appreciate macro-labor after 1st-year core. So room for improvement to be more relevant across fields, but...
b) Macro/micro shouldn't be required over labor/other equally important fields. [1/3]
Jon Steinsson @JonSteinsson
This discussion also all comes in the aftermath of a discussion (also prompted by Steinsson) on gender diversity in macro:
The ratio here is crazy, but the cause is less evident. I pointed out this pattern in a paper in Econ Inquiry (kevinbryanecon.com/YoungStars.pdf) a few years ago, but there is a *huge* difference in field choice and in prep between US/Can/UK/Australia candidates and the rest.
Jon Steinsson @JonSteinsson
This year, Harvard, MIT, Yale, Chicago, Pton, Stanford, Cal, NW, Columbia, LSE, Penn have 54 candidates self-identified w/ macro as primary or secondary field. 14 are women. ONE is a US/Can/UK citizen, and even her main field and job market paper is structural labor.
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Tfw you didn't take a core macroeconomics course
Yannai A. Gonczarowski @yannai@econtwіtter.net @YannaiGonch
Interesting tweets
In the past, I've had students call my problem sets "emotionally trying". (These are for 2nd-year PhD game theory.) This year I'm going to explain myself and set clearer expectations.
Good on SL for setting expectations but I also want to comment a bit. If research is all about being comfortable with uncertainty, we have an adverse selection problem. I went through undergrad with this “comfort with uncertainty, just try things out” mentality and it hurt me. 1/ https://t.co/wngISGgP7O
Shengwu Li @ShengwuLi
@bradchattergoon I agree. The problem is that research requires both technical skill and ability to deal with uncertainty. And one of these is easily measured (grades), while the other is, if anything, mildly decreasing in grades.
Changes to my metrics syllabus for this year:
1. Adding another day of diff-in-diff. At least in finance, it's pretty obvious that this is the dominant empirical paradigm and there's value in spending more time
/1
This is the first time I've ever seen a formal retraction in economics.
Kudos to the authors for being so intellectually honest!
^not actually the first, but
^NYT had a full article on this phenomenon yesterday
This weekend, my lab tried a new experiment: we wrote a paper in one day! Inspired by @JnfrLTackett, we blocked out a whole Sunday, & in <8 hours, we cranked out a surprisingly decent full-length draft. Plus, we had fun, ate a lot of snacks, & fit in a Starbucks run. Here's how!
^obviously couldn’t work for every field/every project, but…
