<p>How hypocritical!!!</p>
<p>Respected physicists?-Gimme a break!!! Santa fe institute? never heard of it !!! Cmon, you can do better than that. </p>
<p>I did, however, hear about the Santa Fe Festival various musical dramas performed in open theatre middle of summer night- How delicious!!!</p>
<p>Please tell me that last post was facetious.</p>
<p>Yes, Molliebatmit, it was facetious. But what I said about "Santa Fe Music Festival" is not.</p>
<p>MattBowes: Hehe, I think I know you... you're the one who tried to talk me into going to Olin over MIT. I admire/am heartily amused by your ego. ;</p>
<p>About the Harvard Engineering School (remember that? the topic of this thread? not econ?): My Harvard interviewer essentially spent my interview talking up MIT (he went to H but his son went to MIT), and he kept mentioning the quality of the humanities at MIT. He said that so few people major in them (because few writers really want to do the GIRs) that you end up having a world-class department with a much higher amount of personal attention than you could at H. Assuming these trends continue and H builds up its engineering as MIT builds up its humanities, if MIT starts losing a few more engineering cross-admits to H, I think H will lose a few more humanities kids (who realistically can do the GIRs easily if they're H/MIT cross-admits anyway) will start looking harder at MIT too.</p>
<p>Rawr. MattBowes' ego is, indeed, something to behold. ;-)</p>
<p>What??? I dont know about that. His ego cannot even come close as compared to yours!!!</p>
<p>Oh Rabban, you just haven't heard his world domination spiel yet. You'll come around. ;)</p>
<p>(Slightly derailing the 3-page econ argument between sakky and Ben Golub)</p>
<p>What do you two, or anyone else here, think of neuroeconomics? I'd never even heard of it until a year and a half ago (I am decidedly not an econ person, though it would be good for me to learn more of the basics), but then there was a girl in my lab class who wanted to go into it, and suddenly when I started my junior year I noticed many more people double majoring in brain & cognitive science and economics, and we read papers on it in my clinical neuroscience class.</p>
<p>Based on what I know, which is admittedly not that much, it seems like a good idea. It addresses an issue that's always irritated me about econ, or at least my perception of econ - that people don't always act rationally or in their own best interests.</p>
<p>For those who have never heard of it, neuroecon, as you might guess, incorporates neuroscience and psychology into econ - here's a link to the Wikipedia article: <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neuroeconomics%5B/url%5D">http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neuroeconomics</a></p>
<p>Good question... last term, I took a course with Colin Camerer, one of the founding fathers of this field. Like many economists, I have kind of mixed feelings about it. On the one hand, it goes a long way toward making economics more empirical and making the strict rationality assumptions more realistic. (Actually, to be precise, behavioral economics tends to be most closely associated with relaxing classical assumptions about utility. Neuroeconomics justifies those relaxations through biological facts.)</p>
<p>The criticism of behavioral and neuroeconomics is that they can seem ad hoc and a bad cross between biology and mathematics. The theoretical elegance of classical mathematical economics is gone, and the precision of real descriptive biology is gone, too.</p>
<p>In some sense, this is a dispute between a certain kind of beauty and a certain kind of realism. In traditional Nash equilibrium models of behavior, we assume economic behavior will converge to a certain kind of pattern of best responses and try to deduce agents' choices from those assumptions. While that can be very beautiful conceptually, it seems more empirically plausible to put the behavior of people in the front end (i.e. use what we know about it and derive the theory from that) as opposed to trying to understand real people based on the assumption that the outcome of their behavior is a certain elegant mathematical pattern (which can be quite hard to compute even for professionals.)</p>
<p>My approach generally to disputes about the legitimacy of this or that science or scientific subfield is to say let a thousand flowers bloom. I don't want to take the more hostile attitude adopted by some of the more traditional economic theorists ("this is ugly and pointless"). Even if it is (and I don't think so), why not give it a chance. The worst thing that could happen is that a few peoples' work will be mostly forgotten, and the best thing that can happen is that economics will become an even more robust and useful science.</p>
<p>Jessie: </p>
<p>What I deduced after a quick glance from previous write-up reaffirms my belief that economists are still shooting in the dark. </p>
<p>Pity that some biologists/psychologists now joined those physicists to tackle the econo-science. After all these new science-based economic theory hooplas, after all those scholarly papers after scholarly papers, after all those futile attempts to merge {insert whatever science you like} with economic theory, after all those millions $ research funds gone wasted it is still the same-old, fundamental, statistical math model with uncertainty that those big-wig economic policy maker has any confidence in using it. Quite coincidentally, the math model is basically the same model that WS analysts have been using for more than 5 decades. :)</p>
<p>Rabban,</p>
<p>I seriously suggest you read the Science paper referenced above, as well as the papers it cites. To judge an entire scientific discipline based on a "quick glance" and with no expertise in the area makes you look silly. It would at least be good if your assertions were backed up with some reference to the scientific literature as opposed to a cursory and apparently random judgment.</p>
<p>People won't take your opinions seriously for free, you know. You have to give them a reason to.</p>
<p>All best,
Ben</p>
<p>Btw, I apologize to all for the bad prose and typos of #89. I typed it literally right after I rolled out of bed.</p>
<p>With all due respect:
If my opinion makes no sense to you, then you have my permission to ignore it.</p>
<p>Thanks. This I knew. I'm just pointing out the lack of justification behind your statements for anyone sufficiently naive to think they might be reflective of reality. (Thankfully, such people are fairly few.)</p>
<p>Jessie:
[quote]
It addresses an issue that's always irritated me about econ, or at least my perception of econ - that people don't always act rationally or in their own best interests.
[/quote]
</p>
<p>I agree economists are like philosophers. They argue, quibble, seldom agree on anything, always agree to disagree. I also agree many economists have introduced elegant mathematical rigor in economics. But science-based, observable/measurable/controllable economics? Well, put it nicely, theyre still in their infancy I wouldnt bet my own money into it :)</p>
<p>Rabban, I think you misinterpreted my comment, possibly because I did word it badly. I didn't mean that I was irritated with econ because economists don't act rationally. I mean that when I hear more traditional economists talk, it irritates me that they assume rational behavior and acting in one's own best interests on the part of the people whose choices they're trying to predict.</p>
<p>You can't even talk about department quality from 10-year period outliers... that makes no sense at all; you have to look at the 2nd tier</p>
<p>Regarding the economics thing, it is often qualitative, where qualitative views are needed.. meanwhile while the math behind it is not necessarily rigorous, this is because there is no amount of rigor that can accurately predict what Ben Bernanke will do - and tractability is more important. Economics is what is behind proprietory trading and so forth; if it's silly then where do Goldman's billions come from?</p>