The economics profession’s simultaneous love for rigor and contempt for realism

[koganbot]

Paul Krugman ("The New Economic Geography, Now Middle-Aged"), arguing in favor of economists' tendency to simplify and go abstract, to use mathematical modeling and quantitative methods: "The geographers themselves probably won't like this: the economics profession's simultaneous love for rigor and contempt for realism will surely prove infuriating

Comments

[koganbot]

Lj weirdness: I made a few revisions after my initial post, and lj entered my first revisions and posted them correctly, but then when I posted a second set of revisions, lj wiped out the first set. Now if I'd been working in two separate windows or tabs simultaneously I might understand how this happened - but I wasn't.

[edgeofwhatever]

LJ's been a bit fucked today.

[koganbot]

Speaking of lj, it informs me that your birthday was several days ago. Hope you had a good one.

Also been thinking a lot about your Kara posts, about how she was able to be kind. Myself, I'm often uneasy around strangers, but actually I think I do better irl than on the 'Net.

The problem on the Net is being kind to the problem people, the Jezebel people, for instance: I might well be sympathetic towards some of them if I knew their actual story. I've worked out in principle that if I think of someone as potentially able to teach me something, I'm less likely to want to trash that person or be worried about that person attacking me than if I'm thinking of them as an adversary or an idiot - even if they're behaving like adversaries and idiots.