I have spent most of my academic career thinking about structural modeling, identification, testing, and data. Just repeating "all models are wrong" is not enough anymore. Models in econ have many uses, one of them is to serve as a way to produce some stylized

https://twitter.com/cshalizi/status/1587881066009804800

explanation, of some selected moments, or even a distribution property. In that regard DSGE could be useful as they provide one possible story. The issue for me is that there is sometimes a continuum (and this literal) of alternative stories that can fit the data. Does it matter?

Whatever people think of economist, I am proud that we train students to work in industry (e.g, tech, consulting), government, academia. They learn mathematical modelling, logical thinking, programming and computational tools, data/quant skills, and a unique way to think. It's not surprise that places like Amazon have been able to use economists to create value. Governments employ economists to evaluate, design and implement policies. The power of marginality, opportunity cost, causal thinking, and mathematical modelling with comptutional tools

#EconTwitter this may be one of the last personal stories in Econ. Again related to publishing in Econ. I decided to share this because I saw a related "academic dilemma". This is about a referee that revealed himself to my co-author and me. It went badly. This was my first paper and it shaped my opinion about Econ academia for the worst. But I also learned resilience and also what I believe are bad practices to be avoided. So hopefully this is useful for someone out there. Back to the summer of 2013 I finished my first paper, it was a co-authored paper.

@BorgersTilman my answer, I had to do a thread since twitter is not designed for long answers :-). @BorgersTilman this is evidently the Achilles'' heel, so to speak of the "as if" approach. But, I think there is a way out. In the original consumer theory program, we were trying to do it all, very ambitious, as it should be, but also I think it is cracking! I think we should break down the problem of predicting and welfare inference into two separate (obvi. related) problems.

#econtwitter I was thinking a lot about rationality, again! Most empirical evidence points out that individually we are not rational in the classical sense of the word. Individuals routinely break the consistency conditions implied by utility maximization. However, when we go to aggregate setups, that is the study of market shares, or conditional expectations, rationality "as if" the population, not the individual, behaves as controlled by a random utility distribution is usually an OK description of behavior. In fact, most macro, IO,