Tuesday, March 01, 2011
Economists in love
Apologies if I have just ruined your breakfast. The recent book Spousonomics ("using economics to master love marriage and dirty dishes) by Paula Szuchman & Jenny Anderson now has a blog. Yeah, who hasn't ? One feature of the blog is short interviews with economists on their love life. Sounds horrific doesn't it? Lets just hope there isn't a movie, seeing Larry Summers in The Social Network was bad enough.
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2 comments:
One thing about the "everythingomics" wave is that many of the topics are actually fairly traditional economics topics given a public rendering. For example, a lot of Freakonomics is causal econometrics applied to markets, sometimes unusual markets but nothing "freaky" really. Family economics has also been around a long time. It would be interesting to see some "omics" books that apply economics somewhere where it really should not be applied.
I am all for applying economics to stuff. But my concern is that there is a presumption that it holds all the answers when we know that other disciplines,like psychology, have insights into behaviour. Not only will this approach yield a limited and perhaps misleading answer, it damages the credibility of the profession.
There is something deeply wierd about economics professors thinking that they can explain everything, especially topics of which they have no specialized knowledge. Would a psychiatry professor publish a pop book doing the same?
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