savageinfidel

Paul Samuelson (the first American Nobel Laureate in Economics, and arguably the most influential economist of the 20th century) died today at home at age 94. He was largely responsible for the transformation of economics from a largely descriptive and discursive discipline to a highly mathematical and rigorous one. He was responsible for turning MIT into a world-class economics center - over the years, he played a role in bringing in Solow, Engle, Klein, Krugman, Modigliani, Merton, and Stiglitz. In addition, he wrote perhaps the single most popular and widely used economics text in history - "Economics", published in 1948. I read it in my undergraduate years in the late 1970s, and it was still selling 50,000 copies a year in the late 1980s. A giant has passed.

Every once in a while (actually, make that "on a regular basis), the Unknown Daughter comes out with something that really floors me. The other day, UD was asking about my grandparents. I told her that both grandfathers worked it the fabric mills in my hometown (back in the day, there were three mills in town). Somehow, the topic morphed into what happened to the mills, so I told her that the mills eventually moved a lot of their business down south, and then (eventually) overseas. "Why?" she asked? I answered, "Because the people there would work in the factories for less, so the mill owners could make the fabric more cheaply. Unfortunately, that means that a lot of the workers in the mill lost their jobs." "So why did they do it if the workers lost their jobs?" "Well UD, since it cost less to make, they could sell the fabric at a lower price. So, while the workers lost jobs, the people who bought it actually benefited. This means that...

Like many programs, the Unknown Alma Mater's doctoral program used Varian's Economics text for our Micro Sequence. So, I perk up when I hear Varian's name mentioned. It turns out he's Google's Chief Economist (who knew - Google has a chief economist?). A recent Steven Levy piece in Wired magazine talks about the ways the company uses economic theory (and auction theory in specific) in their Google AdWords program. Here are a couple of snippets: At the time, most online companies were still selling advertising the way it was done in the days of Mad Men . But Varian saw immediately that Google's ad business was less like buying traditional spots and more like computer dating. "The theory was Google as yenta—matchmaker," he says. He also realized there was another old idea underlying the new approach: A 1983 paper by Harvard economist Herman Leonard described using marketplace mechanisms to assign job candidates to slots in a corporation, or student...

I didn't realize this, but every year Harvard's Kennedy School invites new members of congress for a three-day "briefing" by Harvard profs on various topics. This year, Jeff Frankel came up with a graphic explanation of the current economic crisis. Here it is: Now that's what I call an information-rich slide.

Increasingly, people are putting their lectures, teaching material, and (in some cases), entire courses on the web. Here are a few I've recently come across: A Short Course In Behavioral Economics: Daniel Kahneman (yes, the Nobel Laureate) has recorded and posted videos of a two day conference called "Thinking about Thinking". Robert Schiller's Spring 2008 Financial Markets Class at Yale : Schiller has done a great deal of work in market efficiency, and also created the Case-Schiller Index of Home Prices. While surfing through Yale's Open Classes, I also found a class titled Game Theory , by Ben Polak, a widely published economist. He seems to cover all the big topics: Nash (and other) Equilibrium concepts, Adverse Selection, Signalling, and even Evolutionary Game Theory. If you know of other finance/econ classes on the web, let me know in the comments section and I'll post them here.