To further my goal of gaining 10 kabillion Substack subscribers and getting elected President of Earth, I recently posted a summary of EIAS to /r/badeconomics. This appears to have worked and built on the burst of growth from a restack of part 2. To the 46 new subscribers who’ve joined in the past week: welcome!
I would suggest looking at Gary Becker's various models and the empirical work done on them, e.g. his model of crime and the paper "Stealing to Survive?". Poverty appears to motivate property crime but not violent crime. Alternatively, John Nash's contributions to game theory are often taught as/considered part of economics for their application to problems involving cartels.
I think basic misunderstandings of the things philosophers say count and can be very funny. There's also a similar issue to the one in the post that they often post about, a kind of refusal to think, e.g. Dan Crenshaw confidently asserting morality is just an opinion without God. (Maybe there are lots of arguments to the contrary one should engage with?)
One nitpicky point. It doesnt actually make sense to ask "do utility functions exist?". Preferences exist. Utility functions are just convenient representations of preferences which make analyzing preferences easy. Of course one can ask how likely is it that preferences are complete, transitive and continous (or least the first two) so that they can be represented by utility functions. Tbf economists themselves get sloppy here where they say stuff like "agents are endowed with a utility function" rather than the more precise "agents have preferences which can be represented by a utility function".
Also, demand functions - derived from utility and budget constraints - do in fact exist, we estimate them all the time and really that's all you need for 95% of Economics to work and to do empirical work
Do recent economic models bring any new insight compared to - let’s say - 1900 ? Real question.
I would suggest looking at Gary Becker's various models and the empirical work done on them, e.g. his model of crime and the paper "Stealing to Survive?". Poverty appears to motivate property crime but not violent crime. Alternatively, John Nash's contributions to game theory are often taught as/considered part of economics for their application to problems involving cartels.
Thank you. I’ll have a look at Becker.
My view on Nash is that he refines an existing insight but not really finding a new one. Welcome improvement but not revolutionnary.
The badeconomics subreddit solely exists for insecure economics majors to one up each other and feel superior. Not worth posting there
Also who cares what philosophers think? They cant agree on anything anyway. "bad philosophy" as a concept doesn't even exist
I think basic misunderstandings of the things philosophers say count and can be very funny. There's also a similar issue to the one in the post that they often post about, a kind of refusal to think, e.g. Dan Crenshaw confidently asserting morality is just an opinion without God. (Maybe there are lots of arguments to the contrary one should engage with?)
One nitpicky point. It doesnt actually make sense to ask "do utility functions exist?". Preferences exist. Utility functions are just convenient representations of preferences which make analyzing preferences easy. Of course one can ask how likely is it that preferences are complete, transitive and continous (or least the first two) so that they can be represented by utility functions. Tbf economists themselves get sloppy here where they say stuff like "agents are endowed with a utility function" rather than the more precise "agents have preferences which can be represented by a utility function".
Also, demand functions - derived from utility and budget constraints - do in fact exist, we estimate them all the time and really that's all you need for 95% of Economics to work and to do empirical work