Knowing and Making

Davis, Figgins, Hedengren and Klein have put together an interesting survey of American economics professors - asking about their favourite economists, alive and dead, and about the journals and blogs they read. I downloaded the data behind the paper in the vain hope that this blog might be among the long tail of responses not reported in the main paper (it wasn't). But the data does provide lots to think about. An intriguing point (from a survey design point of view, at least) is raised by one of the questions. The survey asked people to choose their most respected/admired economists from two groups: over 60 years old and under 60. I don't know about you, but I'm not sure I'd know the age of many of the economists I admire. I speculate that the respondents might have subconsciously chosen economists who are much older, or much younger, than 60 years of age, in order to answer these questions with greater certainty. Even if aware of this potential bias, I might ...

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:...