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On VoxEU, Steven Durlauf offers an excellent overview over Kenneth Arrow’s work. Durlauf emphasizes five areas of research: The impossibility theorem, in the tradition of Condorcet. General equilibrium theory and the welfare theorems, in the tradition of Walras. Decision-making under uncertainty, the Arrow-Pratt measures of risk aversion and contingent commodities. Imperfect information, in the context of medical care and as a source of statistical discrimination. Economics of knowledge,...

On their “Quantitative Economics” website, Thomas Sargent and John Stachurski offer great introductions to the Python and Julia programming languages.

In the Journal of Economic Literature, Ariel Rubinstein discusses Dani Rodrik’s “superb” book “Economics Rules.” The article nicely articulates what economics and specifically, economic modeling is about. Some quotes (emphasis my own) … … on the nature of economics: [A] quote … by John Maynard Keynes to Roy Harrod in 1938: “It seems to me that economics is a branch of logic, a way of thinking”; “Economics is a science of thinking in terms of models joined to the art of choosing models...

In Douglas Adams’ book (volume one in the trilogy of four) we learn, among other things: Towels are particularly useful for interstellar travelers on a shoestring. It’s not clear whether humans conduct experiments on mice or vice versa. The answer to Life, Universe, and Everything is “forty-two” as Deep Thought found after an extended period (seven and a half million years) of number crunching. But what is the question? To find out, an even more powerful computer was built: The Earth....

In another excellent post on Moneyness, J P Koning likens the monetary system to the plot in the movie Inception, featuring a dream piled on a dream piled on a dream piled on a dream. Koning explains that [l]ike Inception, our monetary system is a layer upon a layer upon a layer. Anyone who withdraws cash at an ATM is ‘kicking’ back into the underlying central bank layer from the banking layer; depositing cash is like sedating oneself back into the overlying banking layer. Monetary...

In the FAZ, molecular biologist and Tibetan monk Matthieu Ricard advises to find “happiness” (“Glück, innere Zufriedenheit”) by acquiring certain attitudes: Wir Buddhisten, aber auch Psychologen, verstehen unter Glücklichsein keinen für sich alleinstehenden Gefühlszustand, sondern eine Gruppe von menschlichen Eigenschaften. Dazu zählen innere Freiheit, emotionale Ausgeglichenheit, altruistische Liebe, Mitgefühl. Für mich kann Glück nicht eigennützig sein. Wer sich selbst die ganze Zeit...

In Daniel Quinn’s “Ishmael,” a gorilla offers his perspective on human civilization and the narratives surrounding it. Ishmael—the gorilla—characterizes the early agricultural revolution as the takeoff of the nowadays-dominant “Takers’” culture, a culture that does not only reject the hunter-gatherer and herder life of “Leaver” tribes but also finds it acceptable to eradicate the latter. The Takers reject the notion that man is part of a balanced, competitive and evolving natural system;...

Ted Honderich’s The Determinism and Freedom Philosophy Website.

In the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy entry on Causal Determinism, Carl Hoefer suggests in the concluding section (Determinism and Human Action) that there is hope for those who want to believe in free will: There is a long tradition of compatibilists arguing that freedom is fully compatible with physical determinism; a prominent recent defender is John Fischer (1994, 2012). Hume went so far as to argue that determinism is a necessary condition for freedom—or at least, he argued that...

In Econometrica, Emmanuel Farhi and Iván Werning neatly summarize how their work on demand externalities fits in the literature. … pecuniary externalities, which were first shown to arise when a simple friction, market incompleteness, is introduced into the Arrow–Debreu framework (see, e.g., Hart (1975), Stiglitz (1982), Geanakoplos and Polemarchakis (1985), Geanakoplos, Magill, Quinzii, and Dreze (1990)). The logic is as follows. When asset markets are incomplete and there is more than...