Not their fathers’ economics
Students seeking real-world answers are questioning long-held tenets.
http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/commentary/la-oe-weiner-youth-revolt-economics-20120411,0,6994951.story
Finally, a breath of fresh air! Economics has been subject to way too many simplifying assumptions (see here for some thoughts) for way too long. It is refreshing to see that upcoming young economists are revolting (more refreshing still to see it start with a conservative political blowhard), the majority of the economic theories in place today are worse than useless: they provide intellectuals (left and right) with idiotic ammunition to experiment on the masses in ways guaranteed to fail, likely catastrophically. That these theories also seem to have a built-in bias that the rich should always be expected to get richer still is, I am sure, quite accidental.
Anyway, now that the price of supercomputers has dropped to the point nearly any post doc can afford one (I was looking at one the other day that had 128 cores with 256 GB of RAM for right around $25K) it is no longer a reasonable excuse to leave out the sorts of dirty and complex calculations needed to factor in the idiotic behaviour of the average consumer base. I favour the use of evolutionary algorithms to do this sort of thing, even with non-linear feedback adding variables only causes the run times to increase linearly, not geometrically like most other programming techniques. If I weren’t already a tired old man with too many projects already I might be interested in this new wave of economic thought, but I suspect I will relegate myself to an observer, at least until after I retire (13 years and counting…).
