A guide to the trolls

Courtesy of Noah Smith.

I like it a lot. I think I've seen all of them, actually.

HT: Paul Krugman.

A few links

Will soft drink restrictions in New York City reduce obesity? Aaron Carroll, from The Incidental Economist, says "no".

Paul Krugman is winning the macroeconomics debate. Really, he is.

Learn about health policy and the Affordable Care Act in a free class. Hat tip to Kevin Outterson at The Incidental Economist.

From The Guardian - Test policies in 'randomised controlled trials', nudge unit urges. Science? What's that?

What can you do with an economics degree? Well, for one, the video game company Valve is hiring:

(click to enlarge)

The President

From SMBC:

Unconventional criticism

Critics of the economics profession generally argue that economics isn't a real science, that it's "value-laden", or overwhelmed by political bias, or outrageously myopic, or corrupted by corporate funding, or something like that.

I can't resist quoting a critic in the New York Times, who makes the opposite claim. Economists are too much like scientists, he says:

Economists, political scientists and sociologists have long suffered from an academic inferiority complex: physics envy. They often feel that their disciplines should be on a par with the “real” sciences and self-consciously model their work on them, using language (“theory,” “experiment,” “law”) evocative of physics and chemistry.

This might seem like a worthy aspiration. Many social scientists contend that science has a method, and if you want to be scientific, you should adopt it. The method requires you to devise a theoretical model, deduce a testable hypothesis from the model and then test the hypothesis against the world. If the hypothesis is confirmed, the theoretical model holds; if the hypothesis is not confirmed, the theoretical model does not hold. If your discipline does not operate by this method — known as hypothetico-deductivism — then in the minds of many, it’s not scientific.

Such reasoning dominates the social sciences today.

Mission accomplished, I say.

[Update: As I admit in the comments, I'm playing fast and loose with this essay in order to make a point.

Phil Arena has written an extensive review of the book that the essay is based on. Erik Voeten at The Monkey Cage also responds to the New York Times essay. My favorite comment comes from Andrew Gelman: "I think physicists have a bit of physics envy too."]

Mr. Mandate

Economics reporter Catherine Rampell has written an engaging profile of Jonathan Gruber, the primary designer of the Affordable Care Act (aka Obamacare) and Massachusetts' earlier health care reform.

I admit that I enjoyed his comic book, which I bought last week.