Eric Rasmusen's Blog

Anika Prather tweeted in 2020 this W.E.B. Du Bois quote: I sit with Shakespeare & he winces not. Across the color line I move arm & arm with Balzac & Dumas, where smiling men & welcoming women glide in gilded halls-I summon Aristotle & Aurelius & what soul I will & they come all graciously […]

Harald Uhlig (2012) “Economics and reality,” Journal of Macroeconomics, 34, 1, March 2012, 29-41,https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jmacro.2010.09.008 This paper is about methodology. The first, more abstract sections are the weakest, though one useful item was this: This “Methodenstreit der Nationalökonomie”, this dispute between Menger and Schmoller finds its echo in the modern debates between the proponents of a […]

This page will be for notes and links on economics. Hardness versus Importance in Economics. (Akerlof and Ellison) Harald Uhlig (2012) “Economics and Reality”

It is a good working assumption to behave as if Judge Sullivan is taking instructions from the Democratic National Committee (I might say from Joe Biden, except nobody thinks he’s really aware of what’s going on around him). It is unlikely that this is literally true, but it is a good working assumption. Economist Milton […]

This file will be for how to draw diagrams. In August 2020 in Statistcal Modelling Andrew Gelman wrote An example of a parallel dot plot: a great way to display many properties of a list of items

Here I will put examples of abstracts and my rewrites of them. “Frontier planters, immigrants, and the abolition of slavery in Brazil,” by François Seylerv and Arthur Silvey. A protracted legislative battle culminated in the abolition of slavery in Brazil in 1888. In this paper, we unbundle the material interests of individual electoral districts […]

The local public radio station reported that Indiana spokesman Chuck Carney said I had been “placed on administrative leave without pay”. That is false. I asked them to correct it, and they just changed it to “placed on leave without pay”. In truth, on August 13, 2019 I applied, voluntarily, long before any Twitter controversy, […]

I was writing to somebody at Nuffield College, Oxford about co-authoring a paper, and since we didn’t know each other personally, I told him could ask some people there about me. Looking up to see who was still there (I was a visiting scholar in 2007-2008, I think), I saw with dismay, that Sir David […]

Professor Eugene Volokh quoted another lawyer saying magisterially in a post: “It is clear that many media outlets took the clip on its face and republished it and drew conclusions from it without watching the whole video, which became readily available at a rarely early juncture in the whole controversy.” No, isn’t clear at all, […]

######################################## Lists. Lists should have line breaks unless the items are so short that three or more items will fit on a single line. That line breaks are not used is, I think, a survival from the days when typesetting had to be done manually and paper was expensive. Note that legal statutes actually […]