Thu 13 Dec 2001
Don't forget the acient thoughts about the same questions you have. Only they were not working from my perpective. If you need a different perspective, read the old thoughts-- if they were approaching something like the same question I have now.
scarves in nyc. Commissioning photosession of rich 'not pleasant' looking people..

The more ideas that turn out to be useful.
More effective social arragements.
greater population densities.
those societies that did not have temples and priests did not flourish.
The greeks captive took the victors captive.
What truly matters are the basic technologies of agriculture and craft, not the products of high civilizations.
The economic logic of freedom.

Economists make civilization possible.
The circulatory system of civilization?
Needing an understanding on and opinion of economic issues, in order to grasp a basis for cultural existence?

Economics certainly offers the most measurable indicators

look up Paul Krugman - princeton, MIT.

requires a lot of hard thinking to make the models look trivial

economic geography.

The thrill of the seeing the success of the model.

The economists have been successful at modelling something. Are they creating a body of knowledge which can be built on?

Yet an economist still read and reviewed Robert Wright's NonZero.

Paul Krugman: - How I work - a life philosophy.
(1) Listen to the Gentiles
Pay attention to what intelligent people are saying, even if they do not have your customs or speak your analytical language.

Geographers and regional scientists have amassed a great deal of evidence.

models greatly extend the power and range of our insight. Economic models are metaphors, not truth.

someone with a different metaphor may be seeing what you are missing.

[sum:today's feeling of progress: discovery of and possibility of economists for whatever the area I wish to research is. Ongoing concern about posture and the dying/feeling of death from the people around me. Krugman's essay is exciting. Graham; you must invest energy to sit healthily & correctly. Work: use hard chair. Spinal gymnastics.]

Question the question.
if people in a field have bogged down on questions that seem very hard, are they working on the right questions.
Often some other question is easier to answer and more interesting.
An academic who has spent years on a hard problem is rarely grateful when you suggest that his field can be revived by bypassing it.

Dare to be silly. a conceptually minor but mathematically difficult extension. Conceptually minor.
What characterizes conceptually major.
Who gets and has gotten nobel prizes?

assumptions that were unfamiliar and doing simple things with them.
Seeing what's right in front of you.
establishing a person's reason for living-
lack of
presence of

a continuum of goods all w identical production functions entering symmetrically into utility?

Economists work for the treasury dept.

countries of identical economic size with mirror image factor endowments- other young people demonstrate their quality by solving hard problems.

all our models involve silly assumptions.

what is a valuable insight?
it helps us think more clearly

about both the nature of economic eff. & the prospects for achieving eff. under a market system.

valuable insights, even if they seem strange.

doing really innovative theory requires more intellectual discipline than working in a well-established literature.

Hard to stay on course.
easy to go around in circles.
astonishing what foolish things a man thinking alone can come temporarily to believe.

crucial to express your ideas in a way that other people, who have not spent the last few years wrestling with your problems & do not want to spend the next few years wrestling with your answers, can understand without too much effort.

always try to express your ideas in the simplest possible model.
helps you keep control of your own insights & makes those insights acc.

minimalist model.
The essence of what your are trying to say.

minimum necessary model.
the effect has been to allow me to tackle a subject viewed as formidably difficult with what appears at first sight ridiculous simplicity.
seems after the fact to be almost child's play.

the age of diminished expectations.

attempt to make sense of some currently topical policy debate.

I have been able to approach policy issues using almost the same method
paying attention to newspaper reports or the concerns of central bankers & finance ministers - listening to the Gentiles.
trying to find a useful way of defining their problems.
ruthless simplification worth ore in policy discussion than in theory for its own sake.

payoffs: fancier conferences & speaking engagements higher fees
policy research: shock the bourgeoisie, hollowness & silliness of official positions.



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