1) Commenter Mike Chlanda: I’ve randomly picked you to receive my copy of The Heights. Please email me at [email protected] with your shipping information so that I can send it to you. Thanks all for your interest in the book.
2) Russ Roberts gave a fantastic and humbling talk at the Mercatus Center holiday dinner last night that I wish that I could link to here. It was broadly about the limitations of economics as an objective science. Economists have a strong tendency to see what they want to see in data. It seemed particularly relevant to yesterday’s post. I can look at the evidence and see that clearly cities are essential for productivity growth, while Randall O’Toole dismisses those studies as insignificant. Also given yesterday’s topic, Russ had a great quote that was something like, “there are many things that economics isn’t good for. It’s too bad that one of them is macroeconomics.”
I always thought Randall brought an interesting viewpoint to land policy – until he dismissed The Gated City out of hand. What kind of Libertarian would criticize reducing market regulation because the result may disagree with one’s theory.
“Economists have a strong tendency to see what they want to see in data.”
This is called confirmation bias and is one of my biggest criticisms of the current state of the field. : The problem is that the way data is gathered and analyzed in the so-called “hard” social sciences–that is, build up a theory and then attempt to demonstrate it in the “real world”–opens the way up for confirmation bias. Which is one of the reasons why Flyvbjerg’s work was so important–starting with case studies, and extrapolating theory from there is, in aggregate, a far stronger way of arriving at knowledge.
What I really want to see is economics to make a leap and start to understand the workings of their field as an ecology. There was an abortive attempt at it before, I know, but it seems to me better to think of economics problems as ecological problem. E.g. there isn’t a single housing demand: there are several structural sub-demands, which in toto would create a demand ecology and so forth…
And of course, as you know, I am interested in the application of complexity theory to pretty much everything…
I think that field work in economics can be a particularly effective way of conducting case studies. I’m not as familiar with Flyvbjerg’s work, but I think that Elinor Ostrom has really pioneered important work in moving economics toward ecology, focusing particularly on local institutions.
“What kind of Libertarian would criticize reducing market regulation because the result may disagree with one’s theory?”
Well, the type of “libertarian” who is funded by special interests in favor of pro-highway and pro-sprawl policies, such as the Koch brothers. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cato_Institute#Funding
This is “cars rule, no matter what, trains succcccck (hey can I have my money now?)” Randall O’Toole we’re talking about here, right?