Denis O’Brien recently seemed annoyed at the sight of academic economists blogging and twittering. I am not sure what he would make of the potential emergence of a new trend, academic economists rapping. The link below is to perhaps the first viral economics rap-song, describing the differences of opinion between Hayekian and Keynesian approaches to recession recovery. One of the authors is Russ Roberts, one of the people behind Econtalk podcasts, which are among the best resources for economics on the web. It is actually quite good but does raise the question of where all this might go. “NAMA: The Musical” would be up there for me.
Category: Economics
Look at http://www.rae.ac.uk/results/qualityProfile.aspx?id=34&type=uoa
These are the economics results for the most recent Research Assessment Exercise for the UK.
The first numeric column reports the number of staff returned in the subject for each institution: UK departments are comparable in size to many Irish ones. On the same website, one can browse to a narrative for each department: each institution is specifically required to comment on early career researchers. Like some Irish deparments, many UK departments are also developing new talent.
Now compare their position in the Tilburg ranking https://econtop.uvt.nl/ to Irish departments.
Everyone still happy?
Tilburg has produced a ranking of economics departments for the whole world. See https://econtop.uvt.nl/ . It is based on journal publications since 2004. The nice aspect of this website is that you can change the ranking yourself by including the journals that you like and excluding the ones that you despise. No matter how the cookie is cut, our economics departments are abysmal.
Many congratulations to Kevin O’Rourke on being the first Irish-based recipient of the prestigious European Research Council Advanced Investigator Grant for a project to research the inter-relationships between trade, trade policy and the Great Depression: you can find out more details here.
I wrote previously on the potential relevance of behavioural economics to policy. The programme for the AEA conference this year reveals the extent to which academic economics is attempting to augment traditional models with insights from psychology. Recent popular books such as Nudge by Thaler and Sunstein, Animal Spirits by Shiller and Akerlof and Basic Instincts by the ESRI’s Peter Lunn have served to bring these ideas into the public sphere. Another upcoming book by Akerlof and Kranton attempts to bring the literature they have developed on Economics and Identity more squarely into economic debate (see George Akerlof’s IDEAS page for many of the papers the book is based on). The drive to make economics a more human discipline is discussed briefly here as a positive development by Angus Deaton. Deaton primarily addresses the issue of cognitive biases and there is a growing consensus that information processing limitations should be worked into economic models. However, the challenges posed by integrating constructs from areas such as neuroscience and identity theory are theoretically more fundamental and practically more difficult as they involve languages that most economists simply have never used or considered relevant to their domain. My point in posting this brief post is to encourage people interested in how economics relates to policy to begin to consider these academic influences and what they may imply in Ireland. The economic response to the current recession in Ireland relies in no way at all on any of these new literatures and our approach to training economists and finance professionals has largely remained unaltered by them. A good debate about how seriously we should take these literatures for policy is timely.