Knowing and Making

Sorry, I couldn't resist the title. If you'd like to meet Greg Mankiw in person, just head over to the ASSA (Allied Social Science Associations) meeting next week and sign up for his discussion on economic policy . More to the point, the American Economics Association conference is also taking place at the same time. You can get an interesting insight into the concerns and priorities of the discipline by running some keyword searches on the preliminary programme, which is available here . Some topics of interest to me: cognitive : appears 12 times, though mostly related to cognitive and noncognitive skills, particularly with relevance to the labour market. There is one mention of cognitive biases and one of cognitive economics  - which highlights a study called CogEcon of which I wasn't aware. Again though, it appears to mainly focus on a cognitive skills measure for Americans over 50, rather than a more general exploration of how cognition affects economic behaviour...

In a WSJ article about how economists are cheapskates at the AEA conference, the following unusual error appears: Think of the person who orders the most expensive entr[eacute]e at a restaurant, knowing that the check will be shared equally among companions. I find myself trying to pronounce the typo. Is this where the word ' entrecote ' comes from? More seriously, and yet somehow also less: Cornell University economist Robert Frank, working with a pair of psychologists, mailed questionnaires to college professors asking them to report the annual amount they gave to charity. Their 1993 paper reported that 9.1% of the economists gave no money at all -- more than twice as many holdouts as in any other field. Note that twice as many reported holdouts is not the same as twice as many holdouts . Many economists, I have no doubt, are proud of their lack of charitable giving and much happier to admit it in a survey than others might be. And one more piece of odd speculation:...