Late May and early June have seen a parade of economist profiles in the media.
Paras Dhayani's profiles two young Harvard students Andrei Shleifer and J. Bradford DeLong (Harvard Crimson, June 4).
This past Sunday, David Leonhardt profiled former Treasury Secretary and Harvard President Larry Summers in the New York Times Magazine: Larry Summer's Evolution. While Summers remains committed to a market economy, and to liberal international trading rules, Leonhardt describes his increasing concern about the impact of the economy on the middle class (this is his "evolution"). The concern is manifested concretely by an interest in a more progressive income tax, health care reform, and increased government support for medical research.
In the same issue of the NYT Magazine, a much better article. Jason DeParle profiles development economist Lant Pritchett: Should We Globalize Labor Too?. DeParle focuses on Pritchett's support for a dramatically expanded guest worker programs in developed countries:
The basics are simple: The rich world has lots of well-paying jobs and an aging population that cannot fill them. The poor world has desperate workers. But while goods and capital can easily cross borders, modern labor cannot. This strikes Pritchett as bad economics and worse social justice....
The key to breaking the political deadlock, Pritchett says, is to ensure that the migrants go home, which is why he emphasizes temporary workers (though personally he would let them stay). About 7 percent of the rich world’s jobs are held by people from developing countries. For starters, he would like to see the poor get another 3 percent, or 16 million guest-worker jobs — 3 million in the U.S. They would stay three to five years, with no path to citizenship, and work in fields with certified labor shortages. He assumes that most receiving countries would not allow them to bring families. Taxpayers would be spared from educating the migrants’ kids. Domestic workers would gain some protection through the certification process. And a revolving labor pool would reach more of the world’s poor....
Part of Pritchett’s argument is mathematical. Drawing on World Bank models, he estimates his plan would produce annual gains of about $300 billion — three times the benefit of removing the remaining barriers to trade....
The program outlined is more ambitious than most people in developed countries would accept. This is an extremely good article, profiling Pritchett, describing his proposal, and offering critical perspectives from other experts.
Jeffrey Sachs also wants to save the world: Jeffrey Sachs's $200 Billion Dream (Nina Munk, Vanity Fair, July 2007). He wants more foreign aid.
The Sunday Washington Post carried a profile of former MIT prof, senior World Bank and IMF economist, and current head of the Israeli central bank, Stanley Fischer: Fischer Popular As Israel's Bank Chief (AP via Washington Post, June 10).
Andy Guess, writing for Inside Higher ed, interviewed Robert Frank (June 1) on teaching economics.
...The narrative theory of learning now tells us that information gets into the brain a lot more easily in some forms than others. You can get information into the student’s brain in the form of equations and graphs, yes, but it’s a lot of work to do that. If you can wrap the same ideas around stories, around narratives, they seem to slide into the brain without any effort at all. After all, we evolved as storytellers; that’s what we’re good at. That’s how we always exchanged ideas and information. And if a narrative has an actor, a plot, if it makes sense, then the brain stores it quite easily; you can pull it up for further processing without any effort; you can repeat the story to others. Those seem to be the steps that really make for active learning in the brain.
The assignment that seems to have summoned those steps and put them to work in the best possible way is what I call the “economic naturalist” writing assignment. It’s a very simple assignment: You’re supposed to pose an interesting question — and I stress interesting; nobody wants to read your answer if the question’s not interesting, I tell them — and then use basic economic principles, one of these five or six principles that we hammer away at in the course, to try to construct a coherent answer in economic terms to your question.
So, for example, Bill Tjoa, one of my students in 1997, asked, Why do the keypads in the drive-up ATM machines have Braille dots on them? It’s a good question. Drivers obviously can see; why do they need Braille dots on the drive-up cash machines? Mr. Tjoa made use of the cost-benefit principle. That’s probably the simplest and most important of all of the ideas we try to stress in the course. It says that if the benefit exceeds the cost, then it’s a good idea. What he argued was that you’re going to make the machines with Braille dots on the keypads anyway for the walk-up machines, so you’ve got to incur the expense of designing and manufacturing the keypads with the Braille dots. Once you’ve done that, it’s just cheaper to make all of the machines the same way, rather than keep two separate inventories and make sure that the right machines go out to the right destinations. So: Cost lower, benefit the same, it doesn’t inconvenience drivers any to use the machines with the Braille dots, so it would be foolish to do it any other way. So the real question isn’t why should there be Braille dots on the keypads — why shouldn’t there be? There’s no reason not to put them there.
On economists as a group: Chris Hayes described the annual American Economic Society meeting, focusing on the marginalization of thinkers outside of the mainstream: Hip Heterodoxy (Chris Hayes, The Nation, May 24). This led to a debate among economics bloggers and at TPM Cafe. Several bloggers posted a link to this great piece by Axel Leijonhufvud: Life Among the Econ .
If you want to join the parade, Tyler Cowen has advice on How to study economics in your spare time (the text of the post has been lost, but the comments are worth while).