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Ben Golub 🇺🇦

@ben_golub

Sep 24

Free disposal thought for theoretically inclined young economists:

Thinking through what AI means for the economy has a lot of upside.

Our toolbox is very powerful at structuring imaginative thinking about the big changes coming. Few others have these tools.

1/

Imagine a 2055 retrospective on economic thought over the past 30 years.

Seems very likely that a field called (roughly )"the economics of artificial intelligence" is the main character.

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Let's backward induct: many the big ideas in that field are going to be had roughly 2025-30.

It's unlikely that the really interesting questions will first be addressed with mainly empirical methods...

simply because empirical economics is fundamentally backward-looking.

3/

Read 8 tweets

Ben Golub 🇺🇦

@ben_golub

Sep 23

This lovely paper by @SNageebAli, Mihm, and Siga — just revised for Econometrica — proposed a really striking theory of when voters rationally, but wrongly, think that policies are bad for them if they're good for others.

1/2 sites.psu.edu/nageebali/file…

The paper has had a long childhood — I remember first seeing it in 2017 and finding the core adverse selection mechanism remarkable and compelling.

(Check out this study in abstract length, @ShengwuLi ! )

Hope it gets the attention it deserves in political economy.

2/2

PS/

Scott Aaronson once defined an important theoretical idea as one that is hard to ignore in future discussions of the issue (in this case, zero-sum thinking), and I think by that standard, this is an important idea.

Read 4 tweets

Ben Golub 🇺🇦

@ben_golub

Aug 7

In the WSJ, Steven Landsburg proudly used this brain teaser to make an argument about where economics teaching is going wrong.

Instead he illustrates what’s wrong with his way of doing price theory: sloppy economic thinking, way more impressed with itself than it deserves to be.

It's worth thinking through the "answer" he expects, which you can guess based only on knowing his personality (never great):

marginal cost of the fruit is lower for the monopolist. He writes, "In a competitive industry, prices are a pretty good indicator of resource costs."

Let's forgive the obvious incoherence of “in a competitive industry.” His answer is very bad even so.

What will happen to the profit of the monopoly? In the actual world, some of it will be invested in the capital markets, where it might support resource-intensive production.

Read 9 tweets

Ben Golub 🇺🇦

@ben_golub

Apr 27

Small observation on research trajectory in economic theory.

When you first try to do it, most projects you propose are
(i) ridiculous/uninteresting to experts or
(ii) trivial
or, often, both!

This phase is very difficult and it's a big thrill to escape it.

1/

To escape, you have to sense

(i) what directions other scholars consider substantively interesting/promising;
(ii) what experts consider non-obvious.

Judging (i) and (ii) and doing well by these standards is pragmatically what makes young theorists successful

Succeeding at these is a fun, challenging sport.

So fun and challenging that it permanently reshapes how we direct our research.

I think perhaps because failing on these metrics is so painful in youth, once you can do well on them, you really prioritize that.

3/

Read 7 tweets

Ben Golub 🇺🇦

@ben_golub

Jan 28

The notion that amazing papers should not get rejected is an odd one.

Any genuinely important idea is more likely to be strongly disliked. (Some reasons below in a short thread.)

To publish important work, editors have to be bold and overrule some negative experts.

Non-exhaustive list of reasons

1. The first technical work in a new paradigm is often crude and simple relative to the sophisticated and elaborate papers written late in a paradigm, when methods are being polished by a large community of experts in those methods.

2. Good ideas are often counterintuitive and have obvious drawbacks. They often prove valuable mainly through their later consequences.

Experts see the reasons not to pursue the counterintuitive paths: often, they have thought about and rejected these paths themselves before.

Read 7 tweets

Ben Golub 🇺🇦

@ben_golub

Nov 23, 2023

https://twitter.com/besttrousers/status/1727727603803369878

I generally recommend

1. Constructing an n-by-m matrix whose rows are people and columns are issues (or dimensions of issues).

2. Finding the largest few and smallest few singular values.

3. Looking at the corresponding singular vectors in issue space.

(cont.)

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https://twitter.com/besttrousers/status/1727727603803369878

The top few singular vectors in issue space will tell you about "bundles" of issues along which there are considerable distances in the group.

(If these have high singular values, that corresponds to those differences explaining a lot of the group's variation in opinions.)

For example, you might find an axis of disagreement between Buttigieg and Warren-inclined democrats, visible across issues.

Buttigieg people would be in favor of things like market-rate housing, while the Warren people would focus on poking Jeff Bezos with a sharp stick.

3/

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