Paul Romer

> them building their own survey platform from scratch Funny. This nobel prize winner raises an interesting question: If your AI is so great at coding, why is your software so buggy?: https://paulromer.net/openai-bug/

Paul Romer on Mathematica is a good read. https://paulromer.net/jupyter-mathematica-and-the-future-of-the-resear…

Nah. I agree with Paul Romer and think the world's dumbest idea was devaluing the need for empirical evidence in economics by ignoring identifiability[1]. Without that, the whole of economics becomes unhinged from reality and devolves into ideology. One can't even properly ask or answer the question "Is maximizing shareholder value good for the economy?" if the methods of such an inquiry ignore empirical evidence. [1]https://paulromer.net/the-trouble-with-macro/WP-Trouble.pdf

Does anyone have any insight into why Paul Romer is a Julia skeptic? In the blog post https://paulromer.net/jupyter-mathematica-and-the-future-of-the-resear… he says: "Which reminds me. If you are a Julia enthusiast, how do you suppose the investors in this new language plan to make their big score?" Also there's this: https://twitter.com/paulmromer/status/985507319114096640 It doesn't seem like he's followed up on his threat/promise to write a blog post about why he's not a Julia enthusiast, however.

The follow-up post "Stigler Conviction vs. Feynman Integrity " I think explains what effect he was aiming for with that title. I don't think he wanted to say anything specific about Feynman per se. http://paulromer.net/stigler-conviction-vs-feynman-integrity/

There are huge amounts macroeconomists don’t know but if they’re not scientists neither are epidemiologists or nutritionists. Experiments are impossible or necessarily tiny and of low quality in all those fields. Macroeconomics is not a healthy field making rapid progress. David D. Friedman’s verdict on it is that we know very little is true but we know plenty that isn’t. If you want to see someone really ripping into macro read Paul Romer’s The Trouble With Macroeconomics[1]. All that said I know what happens when you contract the money supply; you get a recession. Print lots of money; you’ll get inflation. Decrease inflation; your currency will appreciate. There’s plenty more like that. Purchasing power parity works as a theory of exchange rate formation over the long run and nothing does over the short run. Macroeconomists know plenty. Regarding theory and replication, on rent control I see Montreal and raise you Mumbai[2]. If the rent controlled price is near the market price the damage will be pretty mild. If you haven’t allowed rents to rise since the 1960’s things will be worse. On replication, more than three quarters of cancer biology papers don’t replicate so the fact that some economics papers get retracted doesn’t disturb me too greatly[3]. If you’re doing science sometimes you find out you were wrong or that you made a…

> There is a wolfram blog post comparing python vs wolfram from 2021 Now the view from someone who quit Mathematica walled garden to embrace the Python ecosystem (2018): https://paulromer.net/jupyter-mathematica-and-the-future-of-the-resear…

> assume a spherical cow on a frictionless plane It's even worse than that. In physics, we know in principle what's wrong with that model and how to fix it. Macroeconomics would need to ditch its entire modelling paradigm, except that we still don't really have a good replacement. https://paulromer.net/the-trouble-with-macro/WP-Trouble.pdf

Provide a front-end to Mathics that can open and evaluate Mathematica CDF notebooks. https://mathics.org/ https://paulromer.net/jupyter-mathematica-and-the-future-of-the-resear…

SIC is used across the government. I ran into it in my work because the USPS uses it, and I was working on software that implemented a couple of their change-of-address matching systems. Having said that, if you step back a take a wide view of the situation, it's obvious that the 20th-century regulatory bodies are incredibly obsolete. I argue that they always held us back, but now it's something that even a child can see. For example, check out Paul Romer's writings about the FDA's role in helping the Coronavirus spread: https://paulromer.net/fda_perpetual_process_machine/ (Note that Romer is a co-recipient of the 2018 Nobel Prize in Economics, not some crank.)

1 test per person every two weeks with more frequency for healthcare workers etc.. https://paulromer.net/covid-sim-part2/

Relatedly https://www.nytimes.com/2019/05/06/opinion/tax-facebook-google.html https://paulromer.net/faqs-on-targeted-ads/

Forbidden: It looks like, someone has put the pdf behind bars (.htaccess) https://paulromer.net/wp-content/uploads/2016/09/WP-Trouble.pdf -> Forbidden You don't have permission to access /wp-content/uploads/2016/09/WP-Trouble.pdf on this server. Apache/2.4.18 (Debian) Server at paulromer.net Port 443 -- Maybe the traffic from HN raised the flags, i guess.

He was a strong contender last year as well. BTW, Paul Romer is also an entrepreneur: https://paulromer.net/about-paul-romer/ (relevant to this crowd :)).

When it comes to macro, it is pretty useless. See for example the polemic caused by this paper by Paul Romer, chief economist of the World Bank: https://paulromer.net/trouble-with-macroeconomics-update/

LOL. Yes, running experiments on entire countries is "kind of" difficult, to put it mildly. But the links I shared suggest the divide in macroeconomics goes well beyond that. Quoting from Romer's blog post (http://paulromer.net/mathiness): "The goal in starting this discussion is to ensure that economics is a science that makes progress toward truth. A necessary condition for making this kind of progress is a capacity for reaching consensus that is grounded in logic and evidence. Given how deeply entrenched positions seem to have become in macroeconomics, this discussion could be unpleasant. If animosity surfaces, it will be tempting to postpone this discussion. We should resist this temptation." In the most nice and polite way possible, he's accusing his colleagues of engaging in cargo cult science.

Neither Kay nor Romer are the clearest writers but I think Romer was clearly attacking Stigler (as well as Lucas and others at Chicago) and Kay was just repeating what Romer said. See this: http://paulromer.net/stigler-conviction-vs-feynman-integrity/ I don't have access to Stigler's 1955 paper. It would be interesting to know what he was talking about but putting him in opposition to Feynman seems pretty harsh. It makes it sound like Stigler is a proponent of idealogical thinking and that's how he practiced economics.

This should be read in the context of the next article (https://paulromer.net/environment-as-code/) for full understanding. That said, I'm not a huge fan of the approach described. It's leaning a bit too much on Wittgenstein's Ladder for my taste, but more importantly it's putting concepts out of order. The article seems to dismiss virtual environments as more complex, but they really aren't that bad - they're honestly easier to work with than the approach the author discovered organically, of creating "real" environments by repeatedly reinstalling Python and setting up dependencies from a requirements.txt file. This glosses over the hard part of populating the requirements.txt file, while also not building the necessary conceptual framework to understand dependency graphs (and thus lockfiles). I was especially bothered by the fact that this advises blindly moving a file around using the GUI without trying to understand the purpose of that file, and describing what Anaconda does as "taking over the system". While I'm sure that works, if students are in the position described then they should learn fundamental developer skills first. I.e.: > There is a lot to learn when you are getting started. Try out virtual environments later, when you are ready. If you do not know how to edit a file, run a command from the terminal, and have pip install libraries from a requirements.txt file, you are not ready. It takes mere minutes to learn these skills, and they should have been…

A different framing of this is that politics is, more and more, intruding into science. Paul Romer: > Politics does not lead to a broadly shared consensus. It has to yield a decision whether or not a consensus prevails. As a result, political institutions create incentives for participants to exaggerate disagreements between factions. Words that are evocative and ambiguous better serve factional interests than words that are analytical and precise. > Science is a process that does lead to a broadly shared consensus. It is arguably the only social process that does. Consensus forms around theoretical and empirical statements that are true. In making these statements, a combination of words from natural language and tightly linked symbols from the formal language of mathematics encourages the use of words that are analytical and precise. from https://paulromer.net/mathiness/Mathiness.pdf

Mainstream macro economics is 'captured', and they have been behaving like high priests justifying dubious policies. [1] The 80s onwards have seen massive CEO pay increases, financialization, asset inflation, deregulation, the vulgar celebration of greed by economists and on the other side wage stagnation, increasing inequality, the 2008 crisis and endless bailouts. Greenspan and others are happy to gloat about cornering labour in Congress [2]. This is an odious statement made without protest from members. Macro economists can continue to be tone deaf and believe the narratives of emh, rational expectations, 'freetrade' and 'assumptions' that are disconnected from reality but there is now significant dissent and resistance to these narratives. [3] Evonomics is a good place to start getting a perspective of the scale of problems, and people need to do this untill there is a complete meaculpa and clean up of corporate and vested interests, untill then every single thing macro economists say needs to be questioned and verified. [1] https://paulromer.net/wp-content/uploads/2016/09/WP-Trouble.pdf [2] https://www.federalreserve.gov/boarddocs/hh/1997/february/testimony.ht… [3] http://evonomics.com/economyths-five-stages-economic-grief/

I'd like to tie your comment to an article that was linked to here the other day. It was to a paper by the economist Paul Romer on `mathiness'[0]. It is interesting to me that the standard bearers for progress and achievement (you and others select) are either mathematicians and/or physicists. Why physicists over any other natural scientist? Perhaps because physics is math-heavy and reliant on mathematical domain models to an extent that other fields and disciplines are not. Let us review the fields of human exploration you have omitted. Art including music and literature, the social sciences, the life and medical sciences, economic and political theory, legal theory, the geo-sciences, … do I need to go on? What makes math and physics so special? And before you dismiss my comments, I say this as somebody who has studied the history of mathematics and has read books on likes of Erdös and Ramanujan. (For instance, I would place Brouwer ahead of Hilbert, and I wonder how one can speak of Turing and Gödel but not of Church and Russell.) As for the physicists you mention, two of them were involved in the project that created the most devastating weapons ever used by man against man, weapons that hang over humanity to this day. That is some legacy. Where has this math and physics devotion gotten us to? Collectively I mean. Where has it gotten us to collectively? I have come to believe that our entire culture is so much poorer because of it. Indeed the mindset is so pervasive…

Wait, but this is exactly what modern macroeconomics does by making a huge leap from microeconomic fundamentals and aggregating this into the Solow, Romer growth models and many derived upon models. It got so crazy that Paul Romer critices this approach himself in a well regarded paper last year: https://paulromer.net/wp-content/uploads/2016/09/WP-Trouble.pdf The austrian economists in turn don't pretend to know that macroeconomics work this or that way, they can make assumptions of effects that can happen due to policies, but don't attempt to quantify them. I think the austrian school is largely ignored for two reasons: - from it derives a very libertarian view of the world, which many people reject because of political views. after the WW2 libertarian views were not popular, so Hayek and Mises where largely forgotten. - because its philosophical approach is exhaustively researched and you cannot add more fundamentals, leaving economists with the problem of not having much to work on.

Noah Smith tries to describe the overall state of macro in this recent post: https://www.bloomberg.com/view/articles/2017-01-11/tribal-warfare-in-e… He starts out strong and gives a good overview of the "schools" that have been laid to rest, but concludes on some kind of utopian, happy note that I don't believe he has any evidence to support. But then again he spends most of his time in conversation with leading economists (I think) so he should have a pretty good idea of what's up. Paul Romer has a good summary of the state of macro in his 9/16 paper "The Trouble With Macroeconomics". Here's the abstract: For more than three decades, macroeconomics has gone backwards. The treatment of identification now is no more credible than in the early 1970s but escapes challenge because it is so much more opaque. Macroeconomic theorists dismiss mere facts by feigning an obtuse ignorance about such simple assertions as "tight monetary policy can cause a recession." Their models attribute fluctuations in aggregate variables to imaginary causal forces that are not influenced by the action that any person takes. A parallel with string theory from physics hints at a general failure mode of science that is triggered when respect for highly regarded leaders evolves into a deference to authority that displaces objective fact from its position as the ultimate determinant of scientific truth. It's a good…

For people who might not be economists, let me give some background. Paul Romer is a quite influential and famous economist who is one of the creators of modern "endogenous growth theory". Growth theory is about coming up with simple models of how we think economies grow over time. His theory suggests that economic growth occurs because of innovations that come from features inherent to the society that is growing, and each step of growth has a feedback that affects the next phase of growth. So for example, the amount of knowledge in an economy determines the level of growth, and growth dictates the level of knowledge in the next phase. This is against exogenous growth theory where growth is as a result of exogenous technological innovations that arrive randomly and shock the system. He's widely tipped to win the Nobel sometime soon for this and related ideas. Now, Bob Lucas, another famous macroeconomist and growth theorist (and Nobel Winner) and his co-authors have been in Romer's crosshairs for some time because of what he calls the "mathiness" of their work. He defines mathiness as something that "uses a mixture of words and symbols, but instead of making tight links, it leaves ample room for slippage between statements in natural versus formal language and between statements with theoretical as opposed to empirical content." (http://paulromer.net/mathiness/) In a relentless series of posts and papers, he's been asking questions at the root of whether macro-economics…